He glanced from it to Gerard, and smiled—a smile full of sinister meaning.
“Do you say you do not know this?”
Gerard maintained the same calm collected attitude. He was considering what course to adopt.
“You hear? Either you know what is written here or you are some lying impostor masquerading in a false name.”
“Gerard! Gerard!” cried Gabrielle, intensely moved.
“Aye, Gerard—or some other name,” sneered de Proballe. “Ask his name, Gabrielle.”
“Now, monsieur, at once if you please,” said the Governor, in a stern imperative tone. “Speak, or I call my guards. Do you know this paper? If not, who are you and why are you here?”
CHAPTER XIV
“I AM NOT GERARD DE COBALT”
OF all present Gabrielle was by far the most agitated. The Duke, perplexed, suspicious, and bitterly hostile to the man who had stepped between him and his passion, was chiefly concerned to find how best to turn the thing to his rival’s hurt. De Proballe, angry at having been tricked, was for the moment too occupied in enjoying his personal importance in having thus unmasked the impostor, to think of much else.
But to Gabrielle the issue was all in all. If this were not Gerard her cousin, the man to whom she had been betrothed, how strangely forward and unmaidenly she must have appeared. She recalled with a sense of something akin to shame how she had almost pressed herself upon him in the first moment of his arrival; and at the recollection, her cheeks flamed so that she hid them beneath her hands and involuntarily drew away from his side.