"Yours. Why preserve around your neck, suspended as a relic, that letter of mine relative to the murder which was worth a hundred thousand crowns to you--the murder which we had so adroitly passed off as a suicide?" "Why? wretch! Did I not give you fifty thousand francs for your co-operation in the crime, and for this letter, which I required that I might have a guarantee against your denouncing me? My life and fortune were, then, dependent on its possession; that is the reason why I always wore it around my neck." "It is true, it was cunning on your part, for I would gain nothing by denouncing you except the pleasure of going to the scaffold side by side with you. And yet your cunning has ruined us, while mine would have assured impunity for the crime to the present moment." "Impunity?" "Who could foresee what has come to pass? But, in the ordinary march of events, our crime would have been unpunished, thanks to me." "Thanks to you?" "Yes; when we had blown this man's brains out, you wished simply to counterfeit his signature, and to write his sister that, ruined completely, he had killed himself from despair. You thought that you would make a great stroke of policy by not speaking in this letter of the deposit he had confided to you. It was absurd. This deposit being known to his sister, she would have unquestionably reclaimed it. It was necessary, then, on the contrary, to mention it as we did, in order that, if there were any suspicions of the reality of the suicide, you might be the last person to be suspected. Then what happened? The suicide was believed; from your reputation for probity, you were enabled to deny the deposit, and it was thought that the brother killed himself after having dissipated the fortune of his sister." "But what matters all this at present? The crime is discovered." "And thanks to whom? Was it my fault if my letter was a double-edged sword, cutting both ways? How could you be so weak, so stupid, as to deliver such a terrible weapon to this infernal Cecily?" "Hush--do not pronounce that name!" cried Jacques Ferrand, with a frightful expression. "So be it; I do not wish to make you epileptic. You will see that, in guarding against ordinary justice, our mutual precautions were sufficient; but the extraordinary justice of him who holds us both in his power defied all calculations." "Oh! I know it but too well." "He believes that to cut off the head of a criminal does not sufficiently repair the evil he has done. With the proofs which he holds, if he were to deliver us to the tribunals, what would be the result? Two corpses, at the most only good to fatten the graveyard." "Oh! yes--it is tears, and anguish, and tortures which this prince demands--this demon. But I do not know him, I have never done him any harm. Why does he pursue me thus?"