“I cannot!”
“You know that it is your lover! wretched woman—my husband, Martial!”
Marie-Anne was considering the situation as well as her intolerable sufferings and troubled mind would permit.
Could she tell what guests she was expecting?
To name Baron d’Escorval to Blanche, would it not ruin and betray him? They hoped for a safe-conduct, a revision of judgment, but he was none the less under sentence of death, executory in twenty-four hours.
“So you refuse to tell me whom you expect here in an hour—at midnight.”
“I refuse.”
But a sudden impulse took possession of the sufferer’s mind.
Though the slightest movement caused her intolerable agony, she tore open her dress and drew from her bosom a folded paper.
“I am not the mistress of the Marquis de Sairmeuse,” she said, in an almost inaudible voice; “I am the wife of Maurice d’Escorval. Here is the proof—read.”