CHAPTER XXXIV
Once more brother and sister stood face to face in the great shadowy audience-room of the Reist palace. Again, too, there was the clamour of many voices in the streets below, for a messenger had just galloped in with news from the front, and a sad procession of ambulance wagons had arrived for the hospital. Only it seemed to them both that that other day, of which both for a moment thought, lay far back in some uncertain past. Events had marched so rapidly during the last few months that all sense of proportion and distance was lost. They looked at one another with white, haggard faces. Marie saw that her brother no longer wore his sword.
“What has happened?” she asked, faintly.
The fires of hell were smouldering in his dark eyes. Yet he answered with some attempt at calmness.
“I challenged him. I had the right! He did not deny it, but he will not fight until the war is over. I have broken my sword. I am an outcast from my people—and he is still their king. Marie, you have brought great trouble upon our House.”
“It was not I who brought him here,” she answered. “I was against it always. The trouble is of your making—and his. He drank with me from the King’s cup.”
“Ay! And to-night he refused absolutely to marry you, Marie. I suffered the everlasting humiliation of offering your hand—to have it refused.”
She drew a short, quick breath. It was humiliation indeed. A sudden wild anger seized her. She locked and interlocked her fingers nervously.
“They are an accursed race, these men of Tyrnaus,” she cried. “They make vows only to break them. Their honour is a broken reed.”
Then Nicholas, his face gleaming white through the darkness, leaned over to her.