“When he was standing against the window there, the sleeve of his djellaba fell back. There was a scar like a white seam on his forearm.”
“Yes.”
Marguerite breathed her wonder at this prodigy of insight, and, like a good artist, having made her point, she did not labour it. She related with what reluctance Paul had afterwards told her the thing which he had done.
“I knew nothing of it before. I thought that he was on leave. I should have killed myself whilst there was yet time for him to return to the camp if I had known. Even when I did know, I hoped that he could make some excuse, and I tried to kill myself. But he had, of course, foreseen that, and prepared against it.”
Gerard nodded.
“How?”
“He had taken my little pistol secretly from the drawer where I kept it. He did not give it me back again until I promised that I would not use it unless the Moors were on the stair.”
Gerard de Montignac started suddenly and pushed his chair sharply back. Some quite new consideration had flashed into his mind. He looked at Marguerite with a sentence upon his lips. But he did not speak it. He turned away and took a turn across the room towards the window and back again, whilst Marguerite waited with her heart in her mouth.
“What am I to do?” he asked; and to Marguerite the fact of his actually addressing the question to her made the interview more of a nightmare than ever. He was standing close to her (breaking the breech of his revolver and snapping it to again, and almost unaware of who she was, and quite unaware that with each click and snap of the mechanism she could have screamed aloud). “What am I to do, Marguerite?”
Marguerite mastered her failing nerves.