"I think, Maurice, that in your heart you do us all an injustice—to me, to father, to yourself, even to the King. The King cannot give you that which is not his; your property—like ours—was confiscated by that awful revolutionary government because your father and mine followed their king into exile. The rich lands were sold for the benefit of the nation: the nation presumably has spent the money, but the people who bought the lands in good faith cannot be dispossessed by our King without creating bitter ill-feeling against himself, as you well know, and once more endangering his throne. Those are the facts, Maurice, against which no hot-blooded argument, no passionate outbursts can prevail. The King gave my father back this dear old castle, because it happened to have proved unsaleable, and was still on the nation's hands. Our rich lands—like yours—can never be restored to us: that hard fact has been driven into poor father's head for the past ten months, and now it has gone home at last. These grey walls, this neglected garden, a few sticks of broken furniture, a handful of money from an over-generous king's treasury is all that Fate has rescued for him from out the ashes of the past. My father is every whit as penniless as you are yourself, Maurice, as penniless as ever he was in England, when he gave French and drawing lessons to a lot of young ragamuffins in a middle-class school. But Victor de Marmont is rich, and his money—once I am his wife—will purchase back all the estates which have been in our family for hundreds of years. For my father's sake, for the sake of the name which I bear, I must give my hand to Victor de Marmont, and pray to God that some semblance of peace, the sense of duty accomplished, will compensate me for the happiness to which I shall bid good-bye to-day."
"And you are willing to be sold to young de Marmont for the price of a few acres of land!" retorted Maurice de St. Genis hotly. "Oh! it's monstrous, Crystal, monstrous! All the more monstrous as you seem quite unconscious of the iniquity of such a bargain."
"Women of our caste, Maurice," she said in her turn with a touch of bitterness, "have often before now been sacrificed for the honour of their name. Men have been accustomed to look to them for help when their own means of gilding their escutcheons have failed."
"And you are willing, Crystal, to be sold like this?" he insisted.
"My father wishes me to marry Victor de Marmont," she replied with calm dignity, "and after all that he has suffered for the honour and dignity of our name, I should deem myself craven and treacherous if I refused to obey him in this."
Maurice de St. Genis once more rose to his feet. All his vehemence, his riotous outbreak of rebellion seemed to have been smothered beneath a pall of dreary despair. His young, good-looking face appeared sombre and sullen, his restless, dark eyes wandered obstinately from Crystal's fair bent head to her stooping shoulders, to her hands, to her feet. It seemed as if he was trying to engrave an image of her upon his turbulent brain, or that he wished to force her to look on him again before she spoke the last words of farewell.
But she wouldn't look at him. She kept her head resolutely averted, looking far out over the undulating lands of Dauphiné and Savoie to where in the far distant sky the stately Alps reared their snow-crowned heads. At last, unable to bear her silence any longer, he said dully:
"Then it is your last word, Crystal?"
"You know that it must be, Maurice," she murmured in reply. "My marriage contract will be signed to-night, and on Tuesday I go to the altar with Victor de Marmont."
"And you mean to tear your love for me out of your heart?"