"Visitors?" exclaimed the physician. "No one, except my father." He had no sooner pronounced the word, than he ejaculated the "Ah!" of one who suddenly grasps the situation. He was silent for a moment. Then, controlling himself with an effort, he continued, throwing out his breast and walking up to the other, with distorted face and breathing quickly: "I will satisfy you. I give you my word of honor that I admitted no one to Monsieur Jaubourg's bedroom,--no one, you understand; my word of honor, and it's the word of an honest man, again you understand! And that gives me the right to put a question to you, in my turn. For all you call yourself Monsieur le Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp, and I am simple Pierre Chaffin, we are no longer living under the old régime, and I don't know that you are entitled to come here, on your private authority, to question me like an examining magistrate. You told me that some one had stolen papers from Monsieur Jaubourg's, and you asked me if the person from whom I received a visit did not go into the room where the stolen papers were. That was equivalent to saying that you suspected that person of stealing them, and that person was my father. My question is this: Do you suspect my father, or do you not?" "I will say, as you said just now, that I have no answer to make, having named no one," Landri retorted. His irritation faded away in the face of evidence: he had before him in very truth an absolutely honest man. He had felt it in the vigor with which Pierre had asserted his honor, in the upheaval of his whole being, above all in his outcry of indignant surprise. And lo! a strange and melancholy sympathy stirred in his heart. The tone in which the son had spoken of his father echoed in the depths of his soul. It was like a sudden repetition of his own inward lament. He observed with dismay that, having come thither to obtain confirmation of one suspicion, his visit had aroused another, not in his own mind, but in that of the very person upon whom he had relied to discover the truth; and already it had ceased to be in his power to allay that suspicion. "To decline to answer is to answer," said Pierre Chaffin. "So papers are missing from Monsieur Jaubourg's, valuable papers, no doubt, and you, and Monsieur de Claviers, I suppose, with you, accuse my father of the theft!" "No valuable paper is missing from Monsieur Jaubourg's," replied Landri, "and, once more, we accuse no one." "If it is not valuable papers that have disappeared," continued the physician, "it must be letters. And why do people steal letters? To sell them, threatening to make them public, for blackmail."