“Jean-Louis, listen well to this: I was abducted.”
“My God! by whom?”
“By a vile citizen Representative journeying to Paris.”
“By a——”
“I had emerged from the trees after you left me, and was sitting very passionate by the road, when he passed with his escort and discovered me.”
I kneeled voiceless as if I were stunned.
“What would you!” said Carinne. “There was no Thibaut at hand to throw him to the pigs. He forced me to go with him, and——”
I vented a groan that quite rumbled in the gutter; and at that her voice came through the hole a little changed—
“Monsieur has a delicate faith in what he professes to love.”
I beat my hands on the wall. I cried upon Heaven in my agony to let me reach through this inexorable veil of stone.