“What is one to understand? I ask you that?” said Lory, turning towards her almost fiercely.
“What do you want to understand, monsieur?” asked Denise, quietly.
“Mon Dieu—you!”
“Me!”
“Yes. I cannot understand you at all. You ask my advice, and then you act contrary to it. You write me a letter, and you forbid me to open it. Ah! I was a fool to send that letter back. I have often thought so since—”
Denise was looking gravely at him with an expression in her eyes which made him stop, and laugh, and contradict himself suddenly.
“You are quite right, mademoiselle, I was not a fool to send it back. It was the only thing I could do; and yet I almost thought, just now, that you were not glad that I had done so.”
“Then you thought quite wrong,” said Denise, sharply, with a gleam of anger in her eyes. “You think that it is only I who am difficult to understand. You are no easier. They say in Balagna that, if you liked, you could be a sort of king in Northern Corsica, and I am quite sure you have the manners of one.”
“Thank you, mademoiselle,” he said with a laugh.
“Oh—I do not mean the agreeable side of the character. I meant that you are rather given to ordering people about. You send an incompetent and stupid little priest to take us by the hand, and lead us out of the Casa Perucca like two school-children, without so much as a word of explanation.”