“You had learnt who this lady of your vow was by that time, then?”
“Else I had not been in Malincourt,” he answered, without thinking.
She glanced at him quickly, her face wrinkled with this fresh puzzle.
“Is not that a worse puzzle?” she asked. “Knowing who I was, why not have come straight to the maison?”
“Of course, I might have done so,” he replied. He saw the slip then clearly enough, and tried to cover it with a laugh. “Perhaps I ought to have come.”
“But you did not. Why? I do not mind that you did not, but why should you choose so strange a course?”
“What answer can I give, save it was a whim?”
“You would have seen me sooner had you come and would not have been one whit less welcome; and would in truth have saved me some hours of anxiety. Do you know that, yesterday, I sent high and low in search of you; and only this morning my poor Denys went riding out to Beaucamp on a veritable wild-goose chase to find you?”
Gerard smiled. “Did you at the time know who I was?” he asked.
“Should I have sent away from Morvaix to find you, had I known?”