"Don't talk to me of that old nightcap! I should have conducted the examination myself, then we should have come to quite a different conclusion, or if I had only got hold of the woman first, this morning, her story would have been quite another thing; but so? Oh, it is all a contrived plot!"
"Listen to me, Axel, you have made that allusion once before," cried Franz sharply and decidedly; "fortunately, it was not understood; now you make it for the second time, and I, for my part, must understand."
"Well, then you may understand that it is not made without sufficient grounds."
"Can you make such a declaration to your own conscience? Would you, in your unjust excitement and with wanton cruelty, cast such a stain upon sixty years of honorable life?"
This touched Axel, and cooled him off a little, and he said peevishly, for his unnatural excitement was wearing off, "I have not said that he has done it; I only said he might have done it."
"The suspicion," said Franz coldly, "is as bad as the other, as bad for yourself as for the old man. Remember, Axel," said he, impressively, laying his hand on his cousin's shoulder, "how long the old man has been, to your father and yourself, a faithful, upright steward! To me," he added, in a lower tone, "he was more, he has been my friend and teacher."
Axel walked up and down, he felt that he was wrong,--at least, for the moment,--but to confess, freely and fully, that he had endeavoured to shove off the blame of his own foolishness and untruthfulness upon another was too much, he had not the clear courage to do it. He began to chaffer and bargain with himself, and availed himself of the expedient which the weak and dishonest are always ready to employ,--he carried the war into the enemy's camp. In every age, up to the present time, truth is yet sold, in a weak human soul, for thirty pieces of silver.
"Oh, to you!" said he, "he would like to be still more to you."
"What do you mean?" asked Franz, turning round on him sharply.
"Oh," said Axel, "nothing more! I only mean you may call him 'Papa,' by and by."