"Ah! you propose to deny the act now, do you?"
"No! I killed your brother—or somebody else. I do not know the name of the man I killed—or allowed to be killed! But what do you know of the reasons that impelled me to that murder? How do you know that I was not wreaking a just vengeance? How do you know that that woman—whose name you do not know—was not my sister, and that while avenging the honor of my family, I did not take back the gold and jewels stolen by a seducer?"
"Hold your peace, monsieur! do not insult my brother's memory."
"You have yourself admitted that he was not rich; where did he obtain a thousand pistoles with which to elope with a woman?"
Bois-Doré was shaken. His brother, because of the difference in their political opinions, would never consent to accept from him the smallest portion of a fortune which he rightly considered as derived from the despoiling of his own party. He was obliged to fall back on the allegation that his brother's wife was entitled to carry off what belonged to her. But D'Alvimar retorted that the family was entitled to consider that it belonged to it. Therefore he vehemently denied the charge of robbery.
"You are a traitor none the less," said the marquis, "for having stabbed a gentleman like a coward instead of demanding satisfaction from him."
"Charge it to your brother's disguise," retorted D'Alvimar, warmly. "Say to yourself that, seeing him in the garb of a serf, I may well have thought that I had the right to bid my servant kill him like a serf."
"Why did you not have him detained at that tavern, where you must have recognized your sister, instead of following and taking him in a trap?"
"Presumably," replied D'Alvimar, still proud and animated, "because I did not choose to create a scandal, and compromise my sister before the populace."
"And why, instead of hurrying after her to take her back to her family, did you leave her on that lonely road, where she died in agony an hour later, no one having come in search of her meanwhile?"