But was not a family just a great material force, visibly expressed in the continuity of its patrimony, by its mutual obligations permitting the payment of the debts of some by the fruits of others’ toil? Was it not indeed something else, too, less palpable but more sacred--a solid chain of traditions, a common heritage of honour, probity and courage? What use was it to transmit life if you were not to supply it with a worthy setting, support and comfort from the past, opportunity for a well-stored future? For to transmit life was to admit life’s immortality. And he recited the public services of the Roquevillards, all the outward ways of existence, useful and sometimes illustrious even, that their forefathers had followed. This one, the county magistrate, had died at his post during an epidemic in the town, which he had been the foremost in resisting. Another, later, in a period of troubles and disorders, had administered the finances of Chambéry and restored order in its involved affairs. Whole-hearted magistrates of the Savoyan Senate, soldiers killed by the enemy in the great wars, they had worn, beneath toga or uniform alike, the same bold, brave hearts that had beat beneath the peasant blouses of the first forefathers of them all. The last of them all, Hubert, dying for his country, alone in a strange land, far from all who were dear to him, under a fierce and hostile sun, had given voice to the final vow of his race when he had written: “I offer my life as a sacrifice for the honour of our name and my brother’s safety.” Could the gentlemen of the jury reject this offering? As well forget all the victims for centuries past that had signalised the constantly renewing virtues of this family, like the fires which cleansed their fields at evening of the withered herbage. He threw the weight of accumulated merits in the balance and made the scales tip. The entire army of the dead, who had come down from La Vigie the evening before, to leap across the valley in the dark and join their chief as he stood erect at the foot of the old tree on the Saint Cassin plain, filed by in a long parade. To the merits of the dead he added the virtues of the living. This was not a time to be modest and defer to reticence. He would give all honour to Felicie in the hospital at Hanoi, and again to his sisters, who had made themselves poor in order to suppress even the suspicion of fraud on their brother’s part. For the payment delivered into Mr. Frasne’s hands had not, and could not be, in the eyes of the culprit’s family or of the jurors, either a restitution or an admission, but a definite rejection of all complicity in the theft, even an unknowing or involuntary one.