“Well?” inquired M. de Tregars.
“Impossible to get any thing out of him. I turned him over and over, every way. Nothing!”
“Indeed!”
“It’s so; and you know if I understand the business. But what can you say to a man who answers you all the time, ‘The matter is in the hands of the law; experts have been named; I have nothing to fear from the most minute investigations’?”
By the look which Marius de Tregars kept riveted upon M. d’Escajoul, it was easy to see that his confidence in him was not without limits. He felt it, and, with an air of injured innocence,
“Do you suspect me, by chance,” he said, “to have allowed myself to be hoodwinked by Thaller?”
And as M. de Tregars said nothing, which was the most eloquent of answers,
“Upon my word,” he insisted, “you are wrong to doubt me. Was it you who came after me? No. It was I, who, hearing through Marcolet the history of your fortune, came to tell you, ‘Do you want to know a way of swamping Thaller?’ And the reasons I had to wish that Thaller might be swamped: I have them still. He trifled with me, he ‘sold’ me, and he must suffer for it; for, if it came to be known that I could be taken in with impunity, it would be all over with my credit.”
After a moment of silence,
“Do you believe, then,” asked M. de Tregars, “that M. de Thaller is innocent?”