"My father ..." she pleaded.
"And my brother," he added grimly. "Both caught probably this night in arms against their country—condemned to be shot as traitors...."
"Oh!"
"As traitors," he reiterated firmly. "A year ago the Emperor granted an unconditional pardon and amnesty to M. le Comte de Courson and to M. le Marquis de Mortain ... and every day since then these loyal gentlemen have worked and plotted to hurl him from his throne."
"My father ..." she pleaded once again. And she added under her breath: "You said just now that you could understand ... everything. And M. de Courson is my father...."
"And M. de Mortain, your future husband," he broke in with a derisive laugh and a shrug of his broad shoulders. Then suddenly a swift wave of passion seemed to sweep right over him—a wave of rebellion against Fate, against his destiny, against all the misery, the sorrow, the endless desolation which that fact stood for. "Ah, Fernande!" he exclaimed hoarsely, "how can you trust me so completely, yet give your love to another man?"
She drew in her breath with a little moan of pain. He had hurt her by these words more surely than she had ever hurt him, for she, on her side, had never thought to doubt his love. She believed in it more than ever before, now that she knew that this parting must be for always. But she felt that she had his answer—his promise to help her father and Laurent if he could. Almost she was ashamed to have appeared before him in the end as a suppliant, yet proud in her heart that she had gained so much in the cause which she had pleaded; proud in the fact that Love held him so completely in its thrall, that no base thought, no mean desire for vengeance, had a place beside it in his heart.
Now there was nothing more to be said. The last word had been spoken between them, the last save the one which rose to their lips now ere they parted, but which must henceforth and for ever remain unsaid.
III
She pulled the hood of her cloak over her head, and then turned to go the way she had come just half an hour ago. The clock-tower was just striking eleven. At different points of the vast quadrangle small patrols of watchmen could be perceived making their rounds, seeing that everything now was well and safe. The last of the mutineers had been marched out through the main gates, the tramp of heavy feet was even now dying away in the distance.