“Monsieur, pardon me, if I wound you, but do you see, if my son were still a Christian, I would go and pray his confessor to command him to speak. You have taken away his faith, monsieur, I do not reproach you any more; but what I would have asked of the priest, I have come to ask of you. If you had heard him when he came back from Paris! He said to me, speaking of you: ‘If you knew him _maman_, you would venerate him, for he is a saint.’ Ah! promise me to make him speak. Let him speak for me, for his father, for those who love him, for you, monsieur, who cannot have had an assassin for a pupil. For he is your pupil, you are his master; he owes it to you to defend himself, as much as to me his mother.” “Madame,” said the savant with deep seriousness, “I promise you to do all that I can.” This was the second time to-day that this responsibility of master and pupil had been thrust upon him. Once by the judge, repelled by the resistance of the thinker who repels with disdain a senseless reproach. The words of this good woman, quivering with this human grief to which he was so little accustomed, touched other fibres than those of pride. He was still more strangely affected when Mme. Greslon, seizing his hand with a gentleness which contradicted the bitterness of her last words, said: “He spoke the truth when he said you were good. I came too,” she continued drying her tears, “to requite myself of a commission with which the poor child charged me. And see if there is not in it a proof that he is innocent. In his prison during these two months, he has written a long work on philosophy. He considers it by far his best work and I am charged to hand it to you.” She gave the savant the roll of paper which she had held on her lap. “It is just as he gave it to me. They let him write as much as he likes, everybody loves him. They do not allow me to speak to him except in the frightful parlor where there is always the guard between us. Will you look?” she insisted, and in an altered tone: “He has never lied to me, and I believe whatever he has told me. If, however, he had only thought to write to you what he will not confide to any one else?” “I will see immediately,” said Adrien Sixte, who unfolded the roll. He threw his eyes over the first page of the manuscript and he saw the words: “Modern Psychology,” then on the second sheet another title, “Memoir upon Myself,” and underneath were the following lines: “I write to my dear master. Monsieur Adrien Sixte, and engage his word to keep to himself the pages which follow. If he do not agree to make this engagement with his unhappy pupil, I ask him to destroy this manuscript, confiding in his honor not to deliver it to any one whomsoever, even to save my life.” And the young man had simply signed his initials. “Well?” asked the mother as the philosopher continued to turn over the leaves, a prey to profound anxiety.