Véronique bent her head:
"Yes," she said, "yes."
"Besides," he added, "if there should be any drawbacks, the future will no doubt take upon itself the burden of removing them. It would be enough, for instance—there is no indiscretion, is there, in alluding to the feelings which Stéphane entertains for François' mother?—it would be enough if, one day or another, for reasons of common-sense, or reasons of gratitude, François' mother were moved to accept the homage of those feelings. How much simpler everything will be if François already bears the name of Maroux! How much more easily the past will be abolished, both for the outside world and for François, who will no longer be able to pry into the secret of bygone events which there will be nothing to recall to memory. It seemed to me that these were rather weighty arguments. I am glad to see that you share my opinion."
Don Luis bowed to Véronique and, without insisting any further, without appearing to notice her confusion, turned to François and explained:
"I'm at your orders now, young man. And, since you don't want to leave anything unexplained, let's go back to the God-Stone and the scoundrel who coveted its possession. Yes, the scoundrel," repeated Don Luis, seeing no reason not to speak of Vorski with absolute frankness, "and the most terrible scoundrel that I have ever met with, because he believed in his mission; in short, a sick-brained man, a lunatic . . ."
"Well, first of all," François observed, "what I don't understand is that you waited all night to capture him, when he and his accomplices were sleeping under the Fairies' Dolmen."
"Well done, youngster," said Don Luis, laughing, "you have put your finger on a weak point! If I had acted as you suggest, the tragedy would have been finished twelve or fifteen hours earlier. But think, would you have been released? Would the scoundrel have spoken and revealed your hiding-place? I don't think so. To loosen his tongue I had to keep him simmering. I had to make him dizzy, to drive him mad with apprehension and anguish and to convince him by means of a mass of proofs, that he was irretrievably defeated. Otherwise he would have held his tongue and we might perhaps not have found you. . . . . Besides, at that time, my plan was not very clear, I did not quite know how to wind up; and it was not until much later that I thought not of submitting him to violent torture—I am incapable of that—but of tying him to that tree on which he wanted to let your mother die. So that, in my perplexity and hesitation, I simply yielded, in the end, to the wish—the rather puerile wish, I blush to confess—to carry out the prophecy to the end, to see how the missionary would behave in the presence of the ancient Druid, in short to amuse myself. After all, the adventure was so dark and gloomy that a little fun seemed to me essential. And I laughed like blazes. That was wrong. I admit it and I apologize."
The boy was laughing too. Don Luis, who was holding him between his knees, kissed him and asked:
"Do you forgive me?"