“And you accepted?”
“No, my lady,” responded Charny, watching her fixedly.
She lost color so badly that he moved as if to assist her, but this revived her strength and she recovered.
“No? you have answered No to an order of the Queen’s, my lord?” she faltered, with an indescribable accent of doubt and astonishment.
“I answered that I believed my presence here at present more necessary than in Italy. Anybody could bear the message with which I was to be honored; I had a second brother, just arrived from the country, to place at the orders of the King, and he was ready to start in my stead.”
“Of course the Queen was happy to see the substitute,” exclaimed Andrea, with bitterness she could not contain, and not appearing to escape Charny.
“It was just the other way, for she seemed to be deeply wounded by the refusal. I should have been forced to go had not the King chanced in and I made him the arbiter.”
“The King held you to be right?” sneered the lady with an ironical smile: “he like you advised your staying in the Tuileries? Oh, how good his Majesty is!”
“So he is,” went on the count, without wincing: “he said that my brother Isidore would be well fitted for the mission and the more so as it was his first visit to court, so that his absence would not be remarked. He added that it would be cruel for the Queen to require my being sent away from you at present.”
“The King said, from me?” exclaimed Andrea.