"I did not wish to alarm you."
She made an impatient gesture.
"I am no timid child to be so carefully spared, and if there is anything threatening us"----
"Us!" interrupted Arthur. "Excuse me, the danger threatens me alone. I have never intended to treat you as a child; but I thought it my duty not to importune the Baroness Windeg with matters which must be quite indifferent to her, and which, before long, will be as completely removed from her as the name she now bears."
The tone of his reply was frigid in the extreme. It was her own tone, one she had often enough adopted towards him, when she found it necessary to remind him of her descent or of the compulsion to which she had yielded in marrying; and now it was used as a lesson to herself! Something like anger shot up into her dark eyes as she fixed them on her husband.
"So you decline giving me any information about your affairs for the future?"
"No, not if you wish for it."
Eugénie struggled a moment with herself; at last she said,
"You have refused your people's demands?"
"All that it was possible for me to grant, and all that the people themselves required, I have granted; but Hartmann's terms are so extreme, they will not bear discussion. They would, of necessity, lead to the complete destruction of all discipline, to a state of positive anarchy, and they are in themselves a downright insult. He would hardly have ventured to propose them, if he had not known all that is at stake for me in this struggle."