“He’s here. That’s the essential thing. I’ll save him, and with him all our race——”
PART III
I
THE COMPANION IN ARMS
WHEN Margaret Roquevillard came into her father’s study, as she did each day, to light the lamp and draw the curtains, and take up if she could some special share of his burdens for him, she found him gazing out of the window, watching the rapidly declining daylight.
“Is that you, Margaret?” he said. “There’s no light any more for working.”
He made excuses for his reverie as if it were a weakness in him, but Margaret knew the cause of this preoccupation, though he would not confess it.
“Those gentlemen have not come yet?” she asked.
“I expect them any moment now,” he said. “They were to see Maurice in prison this afternoon.”
“Who is going to make the main argument? Will it be Mr. Hamel?”
“No. Mr. Hamel is the president of the benchers in our order. Maurice being a member of the bar, I begged the president to conduct his case. It’s a tradition of the bar. Mr. Hamel will give us the prestige of his half a century of professional honour, but he thinks he is too old, and too much of a specialist in questions of civil law, to make the argument. He wants Battard to do that. Battard has the highest reputation of any member of our bar in jury trials.”