He felt some wonder over her tone.
“Don’t you wish me to speak to you, then? Have you already forgotten me?”
She did not answer or raise her face.
“Théroigne!” he protested, pleading like an aggrieved boy. “And little as I saw of you, I have felt, in returning to Méricourt, as if I were coming back to old friends. I have had enough of Paris and its horrors, Théroigne.”
At that she looked up at him for the first time. He was amazed and all concerned. The glowing, rich, defiant beauty he had last seen. And this—white, fallen, and desolate—the face of a haunted creature!
“What is the matter?” he whispered. “What has happened to you?”
“Paris!” she said in a febrile voice. “Ah, yes, monsieur!—you come from Paris. And did you see there——”
She checked herself, struck her own mouth savagely with her palm, then suddenly gripped at the young man’s wrist.
“What are they doing in Paris? Is it there, as he prophesied—the reign of honour and reason, the reign of pleasure, the emancipation of the wretched and oppressed? He will be a fine recruit to the cause of so much republican virtue.”
She breathed quickly; a smouldering fire blazed up in her; her very voice, that had seemed to Ned starved like her beauty, gathered to something the remembered volume.