“Thank you for your kind remembrance,” said she, “but I did not at all expect it.”
“Come, come, you are offended with me.”
She gave him a glance of mingled disdain and resentment; but he went on, in a timid, wistful tone—
“I know that my conduct must have seemed strange to you, and I acknowledge that nothing can justify a man for suddenly leaving the woman he loves—I do not dare to say the woman who loves him—without a word of explanation. But, dear Angelique, I was jealous.”
“Jealous!” she repeated incredulously.
“I tried my best to overcome the feeling, and I hid my suspicions from you. Twenty times I came to see you bursting with anger and determined to overwhelm you with reproaches, but at the sight of your beauty I forgot everything but that I loved you. My suspicions dissolved before a smile; one word from your lips charmed me into happiness. But when I was again alone my terrors revived, I saw my rivals at your feet, and rage possessed me once more. Ah! you never knew how devotedly I loved you.”
She let him speak without interruption; perhaps the same thought was in her mind as in Quennebert’s, who, himself a past master in the art of lying; was thinking—
“The man does not believe a word of what he is saying.”
But the treasurer went on—
“I can see that even now you doubt my sincerity.”