“Yes, God’s sake, that’s it! An’ they want Liddy to marry a devil called Borotte, with a thousand cattle or so—Pito the courier told me yesterday. Pito saw her, an’ he said she was white like a sheet, an’ called out to him as he went by. Only half a lung I got, an’ her boneset and camomile ‘d save it for a bit, mebbe—mebbe!”
“It’s clear,” said Halby, “that they trespassed, and they haven’t proved their right to her.”
“Tonnerre, what a thinker!” said Pierre, mocking. Halby did not notice. His was a solid sense of responsibility.
“She is of age?” he half asked, half mused.
“She’s twenty-one,” answered the old man, with difficulty.
“Old enough to set the world right,” suggested Pierre, still mocking.
“She was forced away, she regarded you as her natural protector, she believed you her father: they broke the law,” said the soldier.
“There was Moses, and Solomon, and Caesar, and Socrates, and now...!” murmured Pierre in assumed abstraction.
A red spot burned on Halby’s high cheekbone for a minute, but he persistently kept his temper.
“I’m expected elsewhere,” he said at last. “I’m only one man, yet I wish I could go to-day—even alone. But—”