“What did you mean, then, by looking at him as you did; by whispering together; by letting him hold your hand when he left, and him looking at you as though he’d eat you up—without sugar!”
“I said I was not falling in love,” she persisted, quietly, but with characteristic boldness. “I am in love.”
“You are in love with him—with that interloper! Heaven of heavens, do you speak the truth? Answer me, Zoe Barbille.”
She bridled. “Certainly I will answer. Did you think I would let a man look at me as he did, that I would look at a man as I looked at him, that I would let him hold my hand as I did, if I did not love him? Have you ever seen me do it before?”
Her voice was even and quiet—as though she had made up her mind on a course, and meant to carry it through to the end.
“No, I never saw you look at a man like that, and everything is as you say, but—” his voice suddenly became uneven and higher—pitched and a little hoarse, “but he is English, he is an actor—only that; and he is a Protestant.”
“Only that?” she asked, for the tone of his voice was such as one would use in speaking of a toad or vermin, and she could not bear it. “Is it a disgrace to be any one of those things?”
“The Barbilles have been here for two hundred years; they have been French Catholics since the time of”—he was not quite sure—“since the time of Louis XI.,” he added at a venture, and then paused, overcome by his own rashness.
“Yes, that is a long time,” she said, “but what difference does it make? We are just what we are now, and as if there never had been a Baron of Beaugard. What is there against Gerard except that he is an actor, that he is English, and that he is a Protestant? Is there anything?”
“Sacre, is it not enough? An actor, what is that—to pretend to be someone else and not to be yourself!”