"None; you may go."
"Mademoiselle," said Marteau, facing the Countess as the officer turned away, his men taking the dead bodies and the wounded peasant with them, "you wrong me terribly."
"By saving your life, pray?" she asked contemptuously.
"By—by—your——" he faltered and stopped.
"In what way, Monsieur le Comte?" interrupted the young woman, who knew very well what the young man meant.
In her irritating use of his new-found title, and in the way in which it fell from her lips, she cut him like a whip-lash, and she did it deliberately, too—he, the Count, forsooth!
"Call me Marteau," he protested, stepping toward her, at which she fell back a little. "Or, better still, as when I was a boy, your faithful follower, Jean."
"If the Emperor has the power, he has made you a Count; if he has not, you are not."
"What the Emperor makes me is of little consequence between us, mademoiselle. It is what I am that counts."
"And you remain, then, just Jean Marteau, of the loyal Marteaux?"