She looked warily at his half-mocking expression.
"I suppose, Monsieur Augustin, that you have earned the right to any information I can give you."
La Vireville lazily put his clasped hands behind his head and kept his eyes on her. "Would you really have inserted that knife into me if I had not . . . waked?"
Mme. de Guéfontaine parried. "I will tell you," she said, no more than a little perturbed, "if you will tell me something. At what moment exactly did you wake?"
He held her a second or two under his amused gaze before he would answer. "That, Madame," he said at length, "is too vital a secret to be revealed. I cannot tell you."
"Then I cannot answer your question either," retorted she.
La Vireville made her a bow. "So be it. I shall always cherish the hope that you meant to make a good job of it, like Mlle. de Corday with the late Citizen Marat. Your opportunity, par exemple, was something better. And you, Madame, if it gives you any pleasure, need not know whether I was not awake and watching you all the time." He smiled mischievously. "But let me proceed to the second reason why I am not so magnanimous—what a mouthful of a word it is!—as you think. It is this—that the advent of the patriots of Porhoët followed so soon on your threatening departure that I felt tolerably sure you had not had time, even if you had the will, to summon them. And I remembered that you had warned me of certain suspicious spirits."
This time Mme. de Guéfontaine confessed to emotion, drawing a great breath of relief. "M. le Chevalier, you believe me then—that I did not send for them, that I never should have done!"
"Madame, naturally I believe you. Have you not already told me so? Yet consider—you told me here, after it was all over, while my point is, that the idea had already occurred to me at the time, and that when I had the honour of carrying you off I was pretty sure that you had not, in the event, betrayed me."
She winced at the word, and dropped her head. "I do not know how I could even have threatened it," she said earnestly. "But I was mad."