“You have no right.”
“Every right, my friend. Do I not hold your oath?... Are you not prepared to break it?”
“I’ll not break my oath to you. I’ll serve and help you in every way you can command... my life I’ll give to the cause... give me the most dangerous—the most difficult task to perform.... I’ll do it—I’ll do it gladly.”
“I have given you an over-difficult and dangerous task.”
“Bah! To leave Paris in order to engage horses, while you and the others do all the work. That is neither difficult nor dangerous.”
“It will be difficult for you, Armand, because your head is not sufficiently cool to foresee serious eventualities and to prepare against them. It is dangerous, because you are a man in love, and a man in love is apt to run his head—and that of his friends—blindly into a noose.”
“Who told you that I was in love?”
“You yourself, my good fellow. Had you not told me so at the outset,” he continued, still speaking very quietly and deliberately and never raising his voice, “I would even now be standing over you, dog-whip in hand, to thrash you as a defaulting coward and a perjurer .... Bah!” he added with a return to his habitual bonhomie, “I would no doubt even have lost my temper with you. Which would have been purposeless and excessively bad form. Eh?”
A violent retort had sprung to Armand’s lips. But fortunately at that very moment his eyes, glowing with anger, caught those of Blakeney fixed with lazy good-nature upon his. Something of that irresistible dignity which pervaded the whole personality of the man checked Armand’s hotheaded words on his lips.
“I cannot leave Paris to-morrow,” he reiterated more calmly.