His first feeling was one of relief: the truth was out; there was an end to the torture of the past hour. But after this one flash of sensation, he ceased to consider himself. At his words Louise turned so white that he thought she was going to faint. She raised her hand to her throat, and held it there. She tried to say something, and could not utter a sound. Her voice had left her. She turned her head and looked at him, in a strange, apprehensive way, with the eyes of a trapped animal.
"Eugen!—Eugen is here?" she said at last. "Here?—Do you know what you're saying?" Now that her voice had come, it was a little thin whisper, like the voice of a sick person. She pushed hat and hair, both suddenly become an intolerable weight, back from her forehead.
Still he was not warned. "Will you swear to me you didn't know?"
"I know? I swear?" Her voice was still a mere echo of itself. But now she rose, and standing at the end of the seat furthest from him, held on to the back of it. "I know?" she repeated, as if to herself. Then she drew a long breath, which quivered through her, and, with it, voice and emotion and the power of expression returned. "I know?" she cried with a startling loudness. "Good God, you fool, do you think I'd be here with you, if I had known?—if I had known!"
A foreboding of what he had done came to Maurice. "Take care!—take care what you say!"
She burst into a peal of hysterical laughter, which echoed through the woods.
"Take care!" he said again, and trembled.
"Of what?—of you, perhaps? YOU!"
"I may kill you yet."
"Oh, such as you don't kill!"