Gabrielle glanced at them both and understood.
“Quarrelling again! Lucette, Lucette. You treat him villainously. But never mind, Denys. I know what’s in her heart whatever her lips may say.”
“Gabrielle, I——” began Lucette in protest, when Gabrielle interposed.
“Yes, yes, I know what you would say. But I am not Denys. When the sea is very calm some people like to rock a boat to make pretence; but when the storm comes in reality it’s all very different. Wait till there comes a bit of a storm, Denys, and you’ll see the truth. If Lucette had been I just now in the market place and you had been at hand, you would have seen to whom she would have turned.”
“Has anything chanced, mademoiselle?” asked Denys quickly.
“That which made me wish for you, good Denys. I had visited poor old Jacques Boulanger and was returning through the market place just when the heralds had proclaimed this new and shameful ordinance of the Governor’s—a tax so cruel that it makes my blood boil. A terrible thing occurred. Babillon, the smith, sprang forward to protest, and the Governor, holding him for a rebel, had him done to death there on the spot by his brutal soldiers.”
“How horrible!” exclaimed Lucette.
“But you, mademoiselle?” asked Denys.
“I had just heard the news when his wife came rushing through the place like one distraught, and I was seeking to comfort her in her anguish when the soldiers—oh, they are fiends, those men!—attacked the citizens who had lifted the smith’s body to bear it home, flung the dead on the ground, and when, burning with indignation, I ordered them to desist, they turned on me, one of them thrust me violently aside, and would have done I know not what next, had not a cavalier, a stranger, rushed up to help me.”
“Would I had been there, mademoiselle!” exclaimed Denys angrily. “Would you know the fellow again?”