He walked over until he was within two or three feet of his cousin. “I have something that I want to ask you,” he said, in a cool, conversational tone. “Since my return from Brittany I have received several letters from Lucienne. She has changed perceptibly; she evidently is not happy. Can you account for this in any way?”
Louis gave a start. “I?” he exclaimed, looking up. “How should I?”
The Marquis sat down on the stump of a tree near him. “Because,” he said very calmly, “you are the last member of the family who saw much of her before she left France. Besides, I happen to know that you are the person best able to explain it to me. It has taken me a long while to ask you this question, but now that I have asked it I mean to have an answer.”
He could not, had he sought with the most diabolical ingenuity, have given his query a more entangling form. But Louis looked very straight at him, his mouth suddenly set.
“I have not a notion what you mean,” he replied; “and I certainly cannot account for any change in her.”
“Yes,” observed Gilbert in a meditative tone, “I expected you to do that. You could not very well do anything else. Unfortunately I know that it is not true.”
A red flush swept over the Vicomte’s face and ebbed away as suddenly, leaving him white to the lips, and for the moment speechless. He was so obviously trying hastily to recall some way in which Gilbert might have known his denial to be false that Château-Foix half contemptuously spared him the trouble.
“On the 7th of July last year,” he said, “you said something which has left me with the knowledge, ever since, that you were the person to explain. Tell me what happened in Paris!”
Saint-Ermay pulled himself up on to the log behind him. “Tell me what happened on the 7th of July!” he retorted.
“It was the night that you were delirious in the loft at Pézé.”