"I shall not answer that."
"That shows they are. You have answered. Now I suppose you will pretend that you cannot read your cipher without the key?"
"I can read it perfectly," said the weak, disdainful voice.
"The deuce you can! Well, that's honest, at all events. As I hold the paper in front of you, you could read it off, then?"
"If I pleased."
"As a matter of fact," observed the Colonel over his shoulder to the Major, "he probably knows by heart what is there—there is not very much." He turned once more to his prisoner. "Now I daresay you think that is what I am going to ask you to do, eh?—and that is why you are so ready to admit that you can read it. Well, you are wrong. I am not quite such a fool. What you are going to do, Monsieur L'Oiseleur, is to give us the key of your cipher, and then, deciphering these notes ourselves, we can be sure that we are not being tricked! Otherwise I might just as well have asked you straight out for verbal information, which I see now I could not rely on when I had it . . . though God knows what game you are playing! You follow me?"
"Perfectly." But the sweat was running down his forehead.
"Well now! You are not strong enough to write, I fancy. The Major will take it down for you. Is it a complicated cipher?"
There was a pause which seemed to Laurent endless. He stood there biting his clenched hands, only keeping himself in with the greatest difficulty. Surely, surely they could see what they were doing, and would refrain! The pulsations of La Rocheterie's enfeebled and overdriven heart seemed to be shaking him as he lay there with his eyes half closed, and the silence was filled with the sound of his rapid, sobbing breathing. But at last he said, with a supreme effort to speak clearly,
"Do you really imagine . . . I am going . . . to give it to you?"