As he continued to stand motionless before her, she faintly murmured:
“Gaston!”
He sadly shook his head, and replied:
“I am not Gaston, madame. My brother succumbed to the misery and suffering of exile: I am Louis de Clameran.”
What! it was not Gaston, then, who had written to her; it was not Gaston who stood before her!
She trembled with terror; her head whirled, and her eyes grew dim.
It was not he! And she had committed herself, betrayed her secret by calling him “Gaston.”
What could this man want?—this brother in whom Gaston had never confided? What did he know of the past?
A thousand probabilities, each one more terrible than the other, flashed across her brain.
Yet she succeeded in overcoming her weakness so that Louis scarcely perceived it.