At length: “I have been waiting in the woods since dawn,” said she, in a sudden soft outburst, “hoping for you to pass.”
“For me?”
“I came out into the track now and again, dreading that you had gone by while I watched elsewhere, and once these discovered me, and—and— Ah, monsieur! You see now what I have to endure.”
“Truly I see—more than I would wish to. You are leaving Méricourt, then?”
She looked at him, defiant and imploring at once.
“You would not condemn me to it? You would not even say it is possible for me to stay here?”
The young man did, for him, an unaccustomed thing. He swore—under his breath. It might have been the devil of a particular little crisis essaying to speak for him; it might have been the cry of a momentary conflict between sense and spirit.
The appeal addressed to either was, indeed, as mournful and seductive as the minor play of a pathetic voice could make it. If he gazed irritably at the woman facing him, still he gazed at all because he was stirred to some emotion. The sadness of wet, unhappy eyes, of parted lips, of hands clasped upon the dumb utterance of an impassioned bosom—all, in their single offer and plea to him, were, no doubt, such a temptation to an abuse of that consistency with his theories that his temperament so encouraged him to cherish, as he had never before felt. But he was still so little sensitive to one form of witchery that it needed only a tickle of humour to restore his moral balance.
He laughed on a certain note of aggravation.
“Méricourt is all moonstruck, I believe,” said he. “This is too absurdly flattering to my vanity. First—but there! Mademoiselle Lambertine, I will not pretend to misread you. Yet you do not love me, I think?”