"What design can I have against you," I said, "of which you need be afraid? You are in sufficient peril already, and there is no hope for you. Your life is forfeit. What worse danger can befall you? Soon you will be as dead as the man you murdered."
"I did not murder him," was the strange reply, "and you know it."
"Fool!" I exclaimed. "You are playing the same trick upon me that you played upon your judge. It was unsuccessful with him; it will be as unsuccessful with me. Answer me. What further danger can threaten you than the danger, the certain, positive danger, in which you now stand? You are doomed, Pierre."
"My body is, perhaps," he muttered, "but not my soul."
"Oh," I said, in a tone of contempt, "you believe in a soul."
"Yes," he replied, "do not you?"
"I? Yes. With reason, with intelligence. Not out of my fears, but out of my hopes."
"I have no hopes and no fears," he said. "I have done wrong, but not the wrong with which I am charged."
"Look at me, Pierre."
His response to this was to hide his head closer on his breast, to make an even stronger endeavour to avoid my glance.