“Yes,” I admitted, “old habits are hard to break; even my tongue slips sometimes.”
“Besides,” she added, looking at me steadily, “there was about you something which made me hesitate to call you citizen.”
It was my time to flush. I found myself unable to meet her clear eyes and covered my confusion clumsily by a laugh which even I perceived did not ring true. If my disguise was so easily penetrated it was time I was getting back to my hiding-place.
“Nonsense!” I retorted. “It is proper to say citizen to any one. And, by the way, citizen, what is the name of this village?”
“What, you don’t know!” she cried.
“Is that wonderful? It hardly seemed to me a second Paris.”
“Yet you come to it!”
“I pass through it because it happens to be in my way; I stop for breakfast—I would wish to stop longer,” I added with an expressive glance, “but the Nation needs me.”
“Needs you?”
“As she needs every man she can get to stamp out those cursed rebels in Vendée.”