"It is only fair, my lord, and I wonder how it is that you did not ask before this."
"The Queen forgets my promise not to see the countess without her permission."
"I suppose, though, in your ardor to see the lady again, you could do without it?"
"I think the Queen unjust to me," he replied. "When I left Paris I believed it was to part from her forever. During the journey I did all that was humanly possible to make the journey a success. It is not my fault that I did not lose my life like my brother or was not cut to pieces on the road or in the Tuileries Gardens. Had I the honor to conduct your Majesty across the frontier, I should have lived in exile with you, or if I were fated to die, I should have died without seeing the countess. But, I repeat, I cannot, being again in town, give the lady this mark of indifference, not to show her I am alive, particularly as I no longer have my brother Isidore as my substitute; at all events, either M. Barnave is wrong or your Majesty was of the same opinion only yesterday."
The Queen glided her arm along the chair-arm and following the movement with her body said:
"You must love this woman fondly to give me this pain so coldly?"
"Madam, at a time when I did not think of such a thing, as there was but one woman the world for me—it will soon be six years—this woman being placed too high above me for me to hope for her, as well as under an indissoluble bond—you gave me as wife Mdlle. Andrea Taverney, imposed her on me! In these six years my hand has not twice touched hers; without necessity I have not spoken a word to her and our glances have not met a dozen times. My life has been occupied by another love, the thousand tasks, cares and combats agitating man's existence in camp and court. I have coursed the King's highways, entangling the thread the master gave me in the intrigues of fatality. I have not counted the days, or months or years, for time has passed most rapidly from my being enwrapt in these tasks.
"But not so has fared the Countess of Charny. Since she has had the affliction of quitting your Majesty, after having displeased you, I suppose, she has lived lonely in the Paris summerhouse, accepting the neglect and isolation without complaining, for she has not the same affections as other women from her heart being devoid of love. But she may not accept without complaint my forgetting the simplest duty and the most commonplace attentions."
"Good gracious, my lord, you are mightily busy about what the countess thinks of you according to whether you see her or not! Before worrying yourself it would be well to know whether she does think of you in the hour of your departure or in that of your return."
"I do not know about the hour of my return but I do know that she thought about me when I departed."