Victoria looked at me in silence, as if she did not quite grasp the bearing of my words. But a sudden thought seeming to flash through her mind, she cried in a tone of reproach: "What! You suspect Tetrik! My own relative and best friend, the wisest of men, one of the most enlightened citizens of our age, a man who seeks his delight in letters and displays no mean poetic talents! One of the most useful men in the defense of Gaul, although he is not a man of war! Tetrik, who in his government of Gascony repairs by dint of wisdom the evils that civil war inflicted upon the province! Oh, brother, I expected better things from your loyal heart and your good sense!" "I suspect that man!" "Oh, you iron-headed, inflexible nature! Why should you suspect Tetrik? By what right? What has he done? By Hesus! If you were not my brother--if I did not know your heart--I would think you are jealous of my esteem for my relative!" Victoria had barely uttered these last words, when she seemed to regret having allowed them to escape her. She said: "Forget these words!" "They would greatly grieve me, sister, if the unjust doubt that they express could blind you to the truth." At this moment the servant entered and asked whether Tetrik could be admitted. "Let him in," answered Victoria, "let him in immediately." Tetrik stepped into the room. CHAPTER X. TETRIK. The personage who now entered the apartment was an undersized man of middle age. His face was refined and gentle; an affable smile played permanently around his lips. In short, his exterior bespoke so fully the man of honor that, seeing him enter, Victoria could not refrain from casting at me a look that still seemed to reproach me for my suspicions. Tetrik walked straight to Victoria, kissed her on the forehead with paternal familiarity and said: "Greeting to you, Victoria!" And approaching the cradle in which the grandson of the Mother of the Camps still slept, the Governor of Gascony contemplated the child with tenderness, and added, in a low voice, as if afraid to awaken him: "Sleep, poor little one! You are smiling in your infantine dreams, and you know not that, perhaps, the future of our beloved Gaul may rest upon your head. Sleep, little fellow, predestined, no doubt, to carry out the task that your glorious father has undertaken! A noble task that will engage his efforts for many long years under the inspiration of your august grandmother! Sleep, poor little one," Tetrik added, with eyes dimmed with tears of tenderness, "the gods that are propitious to Gaul will watch over you--you will grow up for the welfare of your country!" While her relative wiped his moist eyes, Victoria again interrogated me with her looks, as if asking me whether such was the language and the physiognomy of a traitor, of a cowardly hypocrite, of a man who was a perfidious enemy of the child's father. Turning then to me, Tetrik said affectionately: