So it was this—all this—Paris, and her luxury, charm, and infinite, bewildering appeal—with which he had merely toyed, because, at the back of his appreciation, lay ever the thought of what Margery Palffy meant to him, and what he had come to ask of her! What had been his reward? Because he had been neither one thing nor the other he was treated as the outcast he had not dared to be. He had no more than fingered the nettle, instead of grasping it boldly, like a man, and so—it had stung! He had relied, throughout, upon something which did not exist—the loyalty of those for whose sake he had striven to keep himself, in all essentials, clean. When he came to them, prepared to admit his little follies, they had slammed the gate of injustice in his face!
Of a sudden, the scene in the garden at Poissy leaped back at him, and he rose and began to pace the room. They trusted hearsay, did they? They gossiped about him, each to each, among themselves? They cast him off, as he had been a pariah, without a chance to justify himself, to give them the explanation which he had been ready to offer, but they unprepared to believe? Well, then, they should have their fill! He had tried to enter what he supposed was a friendly port, and had been torpedoed, raked fore and aft at the very haven's mouth, and sent about his business like the veriest privateer. But there were friendly harbours! There was still Radwalader—his friend! There was still Mirabelle! How ready they were to believe her guilty, between whom and himself there existed nothing but a friendship wholly pure!
Now, the curious chivalry of youth had him firmly in its grasp—the curious, unreasoning, treacherous chivalry which has not learned to discriminate as yet, but which cloaks its own essential selfishness in a fierce allegiance to the thing of the moment, blind to all larger issues, lance in rest to tilt at windmills, hotly insistent upon the immaterial present, scornful of the future, contemptuous of the past. This girl at whom they were all so eager to cast a stone, this girl who was his friend, and whose only friend he seemed to be—was it not to her that he owed his utmost loyalty, rather than to her who had so readily rejected him upon no better pretence than that of hearsay? Because others refused to grant him the confidence in his integrity which they fully owed him, was that any reason for his proving uncharitable, too?—for siding against Mirabelle and with them?
Andrew clenched his fingers savagely.
"She is my friend!" he said aloud, "my friend! As for the rest, if they want proof of my depravity, by the Lord they shall have it to the full!"
The Tempter was very near now, glorying in the preliminary moves of Vanity, his stanch ally.
The bell whirred sharply, as Andrew paced the salon to and fro, and, a moment later, his servant tapped and entered.
"Well, Jules?"
"Une dame, monsieur," announced Vicot suavely, and then—Andrew found her hand in his. There was a suggestion of challenge in her eyes as she lifted them to his, and, before she spoke, her eyebrows went up questioningly and her even white teeth nicked her lower lip.
"You're not angry?"