“He will be in a dutiful haste to rejoin him.”
“Señor, be merciful! You are of a gallant race.”
“That is certain,” said de Regnac. “You, for your part, are acquitted, my child. I take you personally under my protection.”
“Good-bye, comrade!” cried Caron sadly. “We have gone the long road together, and I am the first to reach home. Follow me when you will. I shall wait for you.”
“Fie!” said the Colonel. “That is no sentiment for a renegade. Heaven is the goal of this innocence, whom I save from your corruption.”
They hung him from the branch of a chestnut tree, and lingered out his poor dying spasms. Pepino, after one burst of agony, stood apathetic until the scene was over. Then, with a shudder, correlative with the last of the dangling body’s, she seemed to come awake.
“Well,” she said, “there goes a good fellow; but it is true he was a renegade.”
The Colonel was delighted.
“They have always a spurious attraction,” he said, “to the sex that is in sympathy with naughtiness in any form. But consider: false to one is false to all, and this was a bad form of treachery—though,” he added gallantly, “he certainly had his extreme temptation.”
“The French killed his father,” she said indifferently.