"She is dead," replied the gypsy brutally, and he walked away whistling.
Mario tried in vain to recall him. When he could no longer hear him, he began to run about and play in the labyrinth, trying to convince himself that La Flèche had made sport of him. But the idea of his little companion's death caused a terrible shock to his vivid imagination.
"She used to say that La Flèche beat her," he thought; "but I didn't believe her. He never beat her before us. But perhaps she didn't lie; perhaps he beat her until he killed her."
And, as he reflected thus, the child shed a few tears. Pilar was not a very amiable creature; but there was something of the Bois-Doré in dear Mario; he was particularly sensitive to pity, and the Abbé Anjorrant had brought him up to abhor violence and cruelty. But he concealed his tears, fearing to pain his uncle, whom he already loved passionately.
D'Alvimar left his room at last.
The rest that he had taken, a lovely sunset and the joyous song of the thrushes dispelled the black presentiments by which he had been besieged for several days.
Having dressed and perfumed himself, he sought the marquis and thanked him for the interest he had shown and the care that had been taken of him. Bois-Doré could not make up his mind to accuse even inwardly a man, still so young, of a bearing so distinguished, and a countenance whose habitual melancholy seemed to him genuinely touching; but when they were seated at the supper table, Lucilio being there, as usual, to furnish music, Bois-Doré remembered their agreement, and collected what he called his siege-guns, to make a violent assault upon his guest's conscience.
He had seen too much fighting and had had too many perilous adventures not to be able to arrange his bearing and his features, without having, like Adamas, to make preparatory studies before a mirror. Although his life had long been so placid that he had not been obliged to depart from his natural mildness of manner, he was too much the man of his time not to be able to make his glance say, twenty times a day if need be:
"Vive le roi! Vive la Ligue!"
The sweet notes of the bagpipe relieved him from the necessity of carrying on a commonplace conversation which would have seemed to him very tedious.