The count’s orderly, a dragoon with a jovial physiognomy, had brought a little military order into this salon, and, after having wound the clock stirred up the fire he began to set the table for two. From time to time he watched his captain, who, stroking his mustache with one hand, biting his lips, wrinkling his brow, wore the expression of the most painful anxiety. But Joseph Pourat, this was the orderly’s name, simply thought that the count was scarcely master of himself, while they were trying the assassin of his sister. For him, as for all who were in any way connected with the Jussat-Randons and who had known Charlotte, there was no doubt of Robert Greslon’s guilt. What the faithful soldier less understood, knowing the energy of his officer, was that he had allowed the old marquis to go to the trial alone. “That will do very well,” said the count, and Pourat, who placed the plates and forks after having wiped them, a necessary preliminary, thought in presence of the visible agony of his master: “He has a good heart all the same, if he is a little brusque. How much he loved her!” André de Jussat did not seem to even suspect there was any one in the room beside himself. His brown eyes close to his nose, which had astonished, almost disturbed Robert Greslon, by their resemblance to those of a bird of prey, no longer shot forth that proud look which goes straight to an object, and takes hold of it. No, there was a species of shrinking back, almost a shame, like a fear of showing his inmost suffering. They were the eyes of a man whom a fixed idea possesses and whom the sting of an intolerable pain constantly touches in the most sensitive part of his soul. This pain dated from the day on which he had received his sister’s letter revealing her terrible project of suicide. A dispatch had arrived almost at the same moment, announcing the death of Charlotte, and he had taken the train for Auvergne precipitately, without knowing how to inform his father of the fearful truth, but decided to have a just revenge on Greslon. And the marquis had received him with these words: “You received my dispatch? We have the assassin.” The count had said nothing, comprehending that there must be a misunderstanding; and the marquis had stated the suspicions against the preceptor, also the fact that he had just been arrested. Immediately this idea imposed itself upon the brother, who was mad with grief, that destiny offered him this vengeance, the only object of his thought since he had read the confession of the dead and the detail of her misery, of her errors, her resistances her atrocious deception, of her fatal resolution.