“It is true, I swear it,” he replied very earnestly, and gave her a garbled account of what had passed between himself and Antoine.
As she listened her agitation mounted, and when he finished she exclaimed, as if unstrung in her emotion—
“I will never tell him, I will never tell him.” Then as if realizing she had betrayed herself, she stared at him in distress and alarm, and protested with excited, voluble earnestness: “I did not mean that, Jacques; I did not mean that. Do not misunderstand me. I meant nothing,” and she clung to his arm with piteous entreating glances. “What I meant was I know nothing. You understand that, don’t you, don’t you? Oh, thank Heaven, you warned me. Jacques, dear Jacques, I thank you from my soul, I thank you. Oh, what might I not have done in my blindness!”
So she did know after all, thought Dauban; and his selfish love being satisfied by what she had done and said, his greed began to grow stronger again.
Her sharp wits read him like an open book, and with a dexterous change of tone and manner she said as if speaking her thoughts aloud—
“A thousand crowns! And for a scoundrel like this Gerard de Cobalt!”
“Miladi is infatuated with him and should be saved from him,” said Dauban, with a cunning glance. “Else she may be ruined.”
“No, no, Jacques; don’t tempt me with such thoughts. Yet, how true, how shrewdly true! No, no, it would be vile baseness.”
“You would save her from a villain,” he urged.
“And for my reward she would never look at me again. Oh, Gabrielle, Gabrielle!”