"Just now, on my way here, I met, ten steps from the house, our neighbor Dubreuil. On seeing me he stopped, looked at me an instant with an expression of surprise and grief, and said, 'Are you coming to see John?' 'Surely,' answered I. 'Alas, poor John harangued the crowd this morning at this very place; he spoke against the massacre in the prisons; they took him for a traitor, and the crowd, in its temper--' and our neighbor buried his face in his hands and did not finish. I understood everything. Yielding to the goodness of your heart, desiring to oppose popular justice in its course, you had paid for the attempt with your life!--such was my first thought. For an instant I stood motionless with stupor, my soul in a whirl. I felt I should go mad. Then I ran to our door. 'Brother, brother!' I cried. 'Whence your alarm, mademoiselle?' the porter asked me; 'Monsieur John is upstairs since ten o'clock.' My heart bounded with joy;--but I was not completely reassured till I saw you." I recounted to my sister the cause of our neighbor's mistake in thinking I had lost my life in the attempt to intervene in favor of the prisoners. And I followed by confiding to Victoria the fears which her own prolonged absence had caused me. "True," Victoria answered, "the Jesuit did appear once at the Abbey Prison with Lehiron and some of his brigands. But they soon saw that that was not the place for them, for at the Abbey there was no pillaging, there was no assassination. We judged and condemned the guilty; we freed the innocent." "Alas, and in the name of what law did you condemn the ones, and acquit the others?" "In the name of Eternal Justice, which smites the wicked and spares the good." I heard Victoria in a sort of daze. "And even if," exclaimed I, "a semblance of justice did preside over the carnage, by what right did these men constitute themselves the accusers, judges and executioners of the prisoners?" "Brother, by what right did the jurors who assisted at the sessions of the revolutionary tribunal instituted on August the 17th of this year, declare the accused innocent or guilty?" "They exercised a right conferred on them by the law." "Then the law confers in certain cases, and on citizens elected by the people, the right to judge or to absolve?" "In certain cases, yes; and the present case is not of their number." "John, those are the subtleties of a lawyer. Listen to what passed before my eyes: The people elected by acclamation and installed in the prison a revolutionary tribunal of eleven jurors. The prisoners were brought before them. Then--I saw everything, I heard everything, and I swear before God, aye, on my soul and conscience, that all those who were sentenced deserved the death. My mind is clear, my thoughts calm. Hear what I have to tell you, then you shall pronounce between those who glorify the events of September and those who condemn them: