“A secret?” she inquired, and she continued to smile, but differently, and her eyes hardened almost to resentment.
“Yes; a secret. It is a secret only known to two other people in the world besides myself. And they will never let you know even that they share it with you, Mademoiselle.”
“Then they are not women,” she said, with a sudden laugh. “Tell it to me, then—your secret.”
There had been an odd suggestion of foreknowledge in her manner, as if she were humouring him by pretending to accept as a secret of vast importance some news which she had long known—that little air of patronage which even schoolgirls bestow, at times, upon white-haired men. It is part of the maternal instinct. But this vanished when she heard that she was to share the secret with two men, and she repeated, impatiently, “Tell me, please.”
“It is a secret which will make a difference to us all our lives, Mademoiselle,” he said, warningly. “It will not leave us the same as it found us. It has made a difference to all who know it. Therefore, I have only decided to tell you after long consideration. It is, in fact, a point of honour. It is necessary for you to know, whatever the result may be. Of that I have no doubt whatever.”
He laughed reassuringly, which made her glance at him gravely, almost anxiously.
“And are you going on telling it to other people, afterward,” she inquired; “to my father, for instance?”
“No, Mademoiselle. It comes to you, and it stops at you. I do not mind withholding it from your father, and from all the friends who have been so kind to me in France. I do not mind deceiving kings and emperors, Mademoiselle, and even the People, which is now always spelt in capital letters, and must be spoken of with bated breath.”
She gave a scornful little laugh, as at the sound of an old jest—the note of a deathless disdain which was in the air she breathed.
“Not even the newspapers, which are trying to govern France. All that is a question of politics. But when it comes to you, Mademoiselle, that is a different matter.”