"How could I run after her, when I did not know that she was there, so near to me? Your witness could not hear all the questions I put to the seducer, I had no need to shout them at the top of my voice. How do you know that he did not tell me that my sister had remained at Urdoz, and that what the witness took for flight on my part was not simply eagerness to return to her?"
"And not finding her at Urdoz, you never learned of her deplorable death? You did not even try to find the place where she was buried?"
"How do you know, monsieur, that I am not more familiar than you with all the details of this painful story? Would you, in my place, being unable to remedy the evil that was done, have made an outcry in a country where no one could possibly divine your sister's name or the dishonor of your family?"
The marquis, crushed by the reasonableness of these explanations, made no reply.
He was so deeply absorbed in his reflections that he hardly heard the announcement of a visitor. Guillaume D'Ars was ushered into the adjoining salon.
Lucilio detected a gleam of joy in D'Alvimar's eyes, caused it may be by the pleasure of meeting a friend, or by the hope of finding a means of escape from a perilous situation.
D'Alvimar rushed from the boudoir, and the heavy folding door was closed for an instant between him and his host.
Lucilio, seeing that the marquis was buried in painful thoughts, touched him as if to question him.
"Ah! my friend!" cried Bois-Doré, "to think that I cannot make up my mind what to do, and that I am in all likelihood the dupe of the most infernal knave that ever lived! I have taken the wrong course. I have exposed the good Mooress, and perhaps my child as well, to the vengeance and the snares of a most dangerous foe; I have been clumsy; I have furnished him with his grounds of defence by admitting that I did not know the lady's name, and now, whether the murderer's excuse is false or true, I no longer have the right to take his life. O God, Lord God! is it possible that honest men are doomed to be gulled by knaves, and that, in all sorts of war, the wicked are the most adroit and the strongest!"
As he spoke, the marquis, wroth with himself, struck the table a violent blow with his fist; then he rose to go to receive Guillaume D'Ars, whose jovial and untroubled voice he could hear in the next room.