“About your father.”
She looked at him with an air of profound surprise.
“Do you not know more about it than I do?” she replied, “more than my mother, more than any of us? Did you not, whilst following up the people who robbed your father, strike mine unwittingly? And ‘tis I, wretch that I am, who inspired you to that fatal resolution; and I have not the heart to regret it.”
M. de Tregars had blushed imperceptibly. “How did you know?” he began.
“Was it not said that you were about to marry Mlle. de Thaller?”
He drew up suddenly.
“Never,” he exclaimed, “has this marriage existed, except in the brain of M. de Thaller, and, more still, of the Baroness de Thaller. That ridiculous idea occurred to her because she likes my name, and would be delighted to see her daughter Marquise de Tregars. She has never breathed a word of it to me; but she has spoken of it everywhere, with just enough secrecy to give rise to a good piece of parlor gossip. She went so far as to confide to several persons of my acquaintance the amount of the dowry, thinking thus to encourage me. As far as I could, I warned you against this false news through the Signor Gismondo.”
“The Signor Gismondo relieved me of cruel anxieties,” she replied; “but I had suspected the truth from the first. Was I not the confidante of your hopes? Did I not know your projects? I had taken for granted that all this talk about a marriage was but a means to advance yourself in M. de Thaller’s intimacy without awaking his suspicions.”
M. de Tregars was not the man to deny a true fact.
“Perhaps, indeed, I have not been wholly foreign to M. Favoral’s disaster. At least I may have hastened it a few months, a few days only, perhaps; for it was inevitable, fatal. Nevertheless, had I suspected the real facts, I would have given up my designs —Gilberte, I swear it—rather than risk injuring your father. There is no undoing what is done; but the evil may, perhaps, be somewhat lessened.”