Maxence made no answer.
“Be it so,” insisted the commissary. “I admit M. de Thaller’s complicity; but then we must suppose that he had over your father some powerful means of action.”
“An employer always has a great deal of influence over his subordinates.”
“An influence sufficiently powerful to make them run the risk of the galleys for his benefit! That is not likely. We must try and imagine something else.”
“I am trying; but I don’t find any thing.”
“And yet it is not all. How do you explain your father’s silence when M. de Thaller was heaping upon him the most outrageous insults?”
“My father was stunned, as it were.”
“And at the moment of escaping, if he did have any accomplices, how is it that he did not mention their names to you, to your mother, or to your sister?”
“Because, doubtless, he had no proofs of their complicity to offer.”
“Would you have asked him for any?”