“That sacred pedigree,” she said, and thrust out her under-lip. She spoke in French, which gave the words altogether a different meaning, and in my then humour I was hugely shocked to hear such an expression from her lips.
“You behave strangely,” I said, with coldness, not to be mollified by the half-pleading, half-mischievous glance she cast upon me, “and you speak like a child. There has been enough of childishness, enough of folly, in this business. It is time to be serious,” I said, and struck the table with my flat palm as I spoke.
“Well, let us be serious,” she retorted, slapping the table too, and then sat down beside me, propping her chin upon her hands in her favourite attitude. “Am I not serious?” she proceeded, looking at me with a face of mock solemnity. “Well, Mr. my husband, what do you wish of me?”
“Have you ever thought, Ottilie,” said I, “of the position you have placed me in? I have been obliged to-day to come to a grave resolution—I have had to make up my mind to give up my country and remain here for the rest of my life. It is in direct defiance to my uncle’s commands and last wishes, and it is no pleasant thing to an Englishman to give up his native land.”
“If so, why do it?” she said coolly. “I am quite willing to go to England. In fact, I should rather like it.”
“Because, before heaven, madam,” said I, irritated beyond bounds, “you have left me no other alternative. Do you think I am going home to be a laughing-stock among my people?”
“Then,” she said with lightning quickness, “you broke your promise of secrecy. It is your own fault: you should have kept your word.”
Struck by the irrefutable truth of this remark, although at the same time my wrath was secretly accumulating against her for this systematic indifference to her own share in a transaction where she was the chief person to blame, I kept silence for a moment, drumming with my fingers on the table.
“Eh bien!” she said at last, with a note of amusement and tender indulgence in her voice as a mother might speak to her unreasonable infant. “This terrible resolution taken, what follows? You have effaced, I see, your entry in the famous pedigree, and you would now fill it up with the detail of your real alliance? Is that it?”
I glanced up at her: her eyes were dancing with an eager light, her lip trembling as if over some merry word she yet forbore to speak. Her want of sympathy in sight of my evident distress was hard to bear.