He made a faint gesture. "Then nothing that I can say is of any use."
But she went on in her blind anguish, "If a saint—yes, if our Blessed Lady herself had come to tell me that you could do this . . . and then lie about it to me . . . I would not have believed it, Aymar! I could not. . . . And yet, you have done it!"
"Yes, I have done it!" He looked at her steadily. "And you are not going to try to understand or to pardon?"
"It is not a thing one could ever pardon!" she flashed out. "You have sold your honour!"
With that the blade was full in his own heart, so keen that its stab was partly physical, and involuntarily he put his hand to his side. But he took it instantly away, and gripped the back of the little gilt chair near him. He was the colour of ashes. Yet his head was high.
"No, that I have not done! And there is only one part of it which needs pardon," he said firmly, "and that is, that to save you needless pain, I told you some things which were not true. For what I did I do not ask your pardon."
"You can say that after Pont-aux-Rochers!"
"I can say that after Pont-aux-Rochers. What I deliberately slew, in the hope of saving you, was not my men, but my own . . . instincts. It is not in your power or any one's to pardon me for that sacrifice."
The very look he gave her, at once proud, tender, unyielding and hurt to death, the very yearning of her heart for him, only met that other tide of horrified dismay in fiercer tumult and foam. Avoye de Villecresne burst into tears, and crying incoherently, "I cannot understand you . . . I never shall. . . . This will kill me, I think . . . but I cannot bear to see you . . . as you are now!" turned and went quickly out of the open window, leaving him alone.
And Aymar stood quite still, looking, not after her disappearing figure, but at the old Spanish leather screen, with its embossed border of pomegranates and its faded gold, which had for some minutes been to him the background to her slim body in its narrow gown, her aureole of burnished hair even, in a sense, to her passionate and bewildered voice—looking at it almost as if he did not realize that she was gone. Then he, too, went from the room.