"Then it is your guess! You dare to say—"
"No, I know!" I interrupted rudely, too excited to remember respect. "Shall I tell what these men were like? I had never seen M. le Comte nor M. de Grammont before. One was broad-shouldered and heavy, with a black beard and a black scowl, whom the other called Gervais. The younger was called Étienne, tall and slender, with gray eyes and fair hair. And like Monsieur!" I cried, suddenly aware of it. "Mordieu, how he is like, though he is light! In face, in voice, in manner! He speaks like Monsieur. He has Monsieur's laugh. I was blind not to see it. I believe that was why I loved him so much."
"It was he whom you would not betray?"
"Aye. That was before I knew."
Thinking of the trust I had given him, my wrath boiled up again. Monsieur took me by the shoulder and looked at me as if he would look through me to the naked soul.
"How do I know that you are not lying?"
"Monsieur does know it."
"Yes," he answered after a moment. "Alas! yes, I know it."
He stood looking at me, with the dreariest face I ever saw—the face of a man whose son has sought to murder him. Looking back on it now, I wonder that I ever went to Monsieur with that story. I wonder why I did not bury the shame and disgrace of it in my own heart, at whatever cost keep it from Monsieur. But the thought never entered my head then. I was so full of black rage against Yeux-gris—him most of all, because he had won me so—that I could feel nothing else. I knew that I pitied Monsieur, yet I hardly felt it.
"Tell me everything—how you met them—all. Else I shall not believe a word of your devilish rigmarole," Monsieur cried out.