“Because,” he went on, “perhaps his permission should be asked that these pretty citizenesses accompany me in my carriage?”
“Mais non, monsieur—par pitié, mais non!” cried one of the wenches in a sobbing voice.
He bent down to her—a sicklily self-revealed animal.
“Hush, ma petite!” he said. “We of the Republic do not ask—we take. Thou shalt have a brighter gown than ever De Lâge furnished for thy shapely limbs.”
She stopped crying, and seemed to listen at that. He came erect again, with a smile on his face and his lips licking together, and regarded me defiantly.
“The Citizen Representative can please himself,” I said, coldly, and pushed past them all and walked on. Crépin turned to look after me, gave a peculiar cynical laugh, and cried “En avant!” to his party.
I was to read the significance of his attitude in a moment—to read it in the dead form of Michel hanging from a tree.
I rushed back along the path, and caught the others as they issued from the wood. Crépin heard me coming, bade his men on to the house, and returned a pace or two to meet me. His mood asserted, he was something inclined, I suppose, to a resumption of the better terms between us. At any rate, his expression now was a mixture of embarrassment and a little apprehension. But I spoke to him very staidly and quietly—
“M. Crépin, it dawns upon me that I am slow to learn the methods of the new morality, and that I shall never justify your choice of a secretary.”
“You are going to leave me.”