“No, Jacques. They are concealing something from me, I know, and I do not ask you to tell me what it is. I know quite enough. You will have to appear in court.”
“I beg your pardon. That question has not yet been decided.”
“But it will be decided, and against you.”
Jacques knew very well it would be so, and dreaded it; but he still insisted upon playing his part.
“Well,” he said, “if I appear in court, I shall be acquitted.”
“Are you quite sure of that?”
“I have ninety-nine chances out of a hundred for me.”
“There is one, however, against you,” cried the young girl. And seizing Jacques’s hands, and pressing them with a force of which he would never have suspected her, she added,—
“You have no right to run that one chance.”
Jacques trembled in all his limbs. Was it possible? Did he understand her? Did Dionysia herself come and suggest to him that act of supreme despair, from which his counsel had so strongly dissuaded him?