She turned red and white by turns, and gasped for breath.
“Why am I not a man?—why don’t I wear a sword? I would pass it through this caitiff’s heart. The cowardly slave!—the fiend! for who but a fiend could slander an angel like my Josephine? Hooked? Oh! she will never marry you if she sees this.”
“Then don’t let her see it: and why take it to heart like that? I don’t trust to the word of a man who owns that his story is a thing he dares not sign his name to; at all events, I shall not put his word against yours. But it is best to understand one another in time. I am a plain man, but not a soft one. I should not be an easygoing husband like some I see about: I’d have no wasps round my honey; if my wife took a lover I would not lecture THE WOMAN—what is the use?—I’d kill THE MAN then and there, in-doors or out, as I would kill a snake. If she took another, I’d send him after the first, and so on till one killed me.”
“And serve the wretches right.”
“Yes; but for my own sake I don’t choose to marry a woman that loves any other man. So tell me the plain truth; come.”
Rose turned chill in her inside. “I have no lover,” she stammered. “I have a young fool that comes and teases me: but it is no secret. He is away, but why? he is on a sickbed, poor little fellow!”
“But your sister? She could not have a lover unknown to you.”
“I defy her. No, sir; I have not seen her speak three words to any young man except Monsieur Riviere this three years past.”
“That is enough;” and he tore the letter quietly to atoms.
Then Rose saw she could afford a little more candor. “Understand me; I can’t speak of what happened when I was a child. But if ever she had a girlish attachment, he has not followed it up, or surely I should have seen something of him all these years.”