“But, Gilbert, I always asked you to leave me here. It was what I wanted. I don’t want to go even now. The Princess——”
“Yes, I know, my darling,” interrupted Château-Foix. “It is just like you. But I ought never to have done it. However, it is no good talking about it. The Princess had more sense than I have had, in making arrangements for you to go to England. I shall not know a moment’s peace till you are out of this horrible place.”
The smile came back to Lucienne’s mouth, “Oh, it wasn’t so bad as that!” she said, not very truthfully. “I—we—were quite safe, really. And we have got used to seeing the sans-culottes about by this time.”
But his betrothed’s treatment of the crisis seemed very far from reassuring the Marquis. His face grew still graver, his clasp of her hands closer, his voice more charged with feeling. “Lucienne, you must never go through such things again. You don’t know what you are to me. Do you realise in the least, I wonder, how I think of you—how I see you down at Chantemerle, in the morning, perhaps, when I go round the home-farm, or when I ride alone along the lanes. And all the time——” His voice changed. “If I had seen you in reality, here, in this, I could not have respected your mother’s wish, and waited. . . . And now we have waited too long, and I have got to send you away.”
He broke off abruptly, loosed her hands, sprang up and went to the window. A fire which he had never guessed at ran along his nerves, strung as they were by anxiety and excitement. She was no longer the creature removed above the sphere of emotion; she was a woman, beautiful, adorable—and his! He swung round from the window, stood in front of her, and holding out his arms said in a shaken but imperious voice: “Come here, Lucienne!”
And when Lucienne had got up from the sofa—blindly, almost as if she did not know what she was doing, he folded her passionately in his arms, and kissed her again and again, till she hid her face on his breast, and he discovered that she was crying.
At that he kissed her hair. “Why are you crying, darling?” he asked tenderly. “You are quite safe now.”
She pushed with her little hands against his breast, trying to free herself. “Don’t, don’t—you frighten me!”
He loosed her instantly, thinking what a selfish brute he was, and she—how untouched a lily! “I didn’t mean to frighten you, dear. But there’s nothing to be frightened of. See—let us sit down again and talk quietly. You must never be afraid of me, Lucienne.” And he got her gently back to the sofa, where she sat leaning against his shoulder, with her handkerchief to her eyes and her sobs growing gradually fainter, while, reproaching himself for his want of consideration, he talked of he knew not what. “The Princess was telling me yesterday how brave you have been.”
“I haven’t been brave.” She choked down a sob. “But I wish I could stay. If you knew how Madame Elisabeth——”