“I understand.”
“Afterward—some time later—she discovered that I was—that I was not the wealthy nobleman she had imagined me to be,” half-stammered Gilardoni’s master.
“That was enough. I comprehend. That was quite enough for her. But if she wished to entrap you, she would have dared to consent to marry you.”
“My good fellow, I wish to get to my room,” said the young officer, who felt sick at heart, although a faint gleam of hope had come to him. “It is almost break of dawn.”
These last words struck him with a singular sense of being familiar, as if he had uttered them in some previous stage of existence, or had heard some one speak them at some startling crisis.
“You must be tired out, sir.”
Gilardoni pushed the little cross toward his master without making any remark about it.
“I don’t want the thing, Gilardoni,” said Paul Desfrayne, with a half-contemptuous sigh. “It is yours of right, I doubt not. It can have no value for me. I do not know why I have preserved it.”
He took up the taper which his valet had lighted, and went into his bedroom, saying he had no need of further service from Gilardoni.
Then he closed and locked the door, and sat down on the edge of his bed, to consider his position.