"To be sure I do," replied Maurice.
"Well, it seems to me, you are not a vile traitor to your country. What say you? as Manlius says."
"Lorin!"
"Undoubtedly; unless you believe that those idolize their country who give house-room, bed, and board to Monsieur le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge, who is not a high Republican, as I suppose, and has not been accused at any time of having taken part in the days of September."
"Ah! Lorin," said Maurice, sighing heavily.
"Still, it appears to me," continued the moralist, "that you have been, and still are, too intimate with the enemies of your country. Come! Come, friend Maurice, do not rebel! you are like the whilom Enceladus; you move a mountain each time you turn yourself."
Lorin pronounced these words in the kindest manner possible, and glossed them over with an artifice truly Ciceronian.
Maurice merely made a gesture of dissent, but the gesture was unheeded, and Lorin continued,—
"If we exist in a greenhouse temperature, a healthy atmosphere, where, according to botanic rules, the barometer invariably points to sixteen degrees, I should say, my dear Maurice, that this is elegant, satisfactory; what though we are occasionally rather aristocratic, we flourish and do well. But if scorched in a heat of thirty-five or forty degrees, the sap burns, so that it rises slowly, and from the excess of heat seems cold; when cold, then comes the blight of suspicion,—you know this, Maurice,—and once suspected, you possess too much good sense not to know what we shall be, or rather that ere long we shall be no more."
"Well, then," said Maurice, "they can kill me, and there will be an end of me, for I am weary of my life."