Twice she faltered "No." And then she cried, with a sudden flare of irritation: "I do not love you! I cannot help that. Oh, you—you unutterable bully!"
Gravely he shook his head at her.
"But indeed you are a bully. You are trying to bully me into caring for you, and you know it. What else moved you to return to Bellegarde, and to sit here, a doomed man, tranquilly reading? Yes, but you were,—I happened to see you, through the key-hole in the gate. And why else should you be doing that unless you were trying to bully me into admiring you?"
"Because I adore you," said John Bulmer, taking affairs in order; "and because in this noble and joyous history of the great conqueror and excellent monarch, King Arthur, I find much diverting matter; and because, to be quite frank, Claire, I consider an existence without you neither alluring nor possible."
She had noticeably pinkened. "Oh, monsieur," the girl cried, "you are laughing because you are afraid that I will laugh at what you are saying to me. Believe me, I have no desire to laugh. It frightens me, rather. I had thought that nowadays no man could behave with a foolishness so divine. I had thought all such extravagancy perished with the Launcelot and Palomides of your book. And I had thought—that in any event, you had no earthly right to call me Claire."
"Superficially, the reproach is just," he assented, "but what was the name your Palomides cried in battle, pray? Was it not Ysoude! when his searching sword had at last found the joints of his adversary's armor, or when the foe's helmet spouted blood? Ysoude! when the line of adverse spears wavered and broke, and the Saracen was victor? Was it not Ysoude! he murmured riding over alien hill and valley in pursuit of the Questing Beast?—'the glatisant beast'? Assuredly, he cried Ysoude! and meantime La Beale Ysoude sits snug in Cornwall with Tristram, who dons his armor once in a while to roll Palomides in the sand coram populo. Still the name was sweet, and I protest the Saracen had a perfect right to mention it whenever he felt so inclined."
"You jest at everything," she lamented—"which is one of the many traits that I dislike in you."
"Knowing your heart to be very tender," he submitted, "I am endeavoring to present as jovial and callous an appearance as may be possible—to you, whom I love as Palomides loved Ysoude. Otherwise, you might be cruelly upset by your compassion and sympathy. Yet stay; is there not another similitude? Assuredly, for you love me much as Ysoude loved Palomides. What the deuce is all this lamentation to you? You do not value it the beard of an onion,—while of course grieving that your friendship should have been so utterly misconstrued, and wrongly interpreted,—and—trusting that nothing you have said or done has misled me—Oh, but I know you women!"
"Indeed, I sometimes wonder," she reflected, "what sort of women you have been friends with hitherto? They must have been very patient of nonsense."
"Ah, do you think so?—At all events, you interrupt my peroration. For we have fought, you and I, a—battle which is over, so far as I am concerned. And the other side has won. Well! Pompey was reckoned a very pretty fellow in his day, but he took to his heels at Pharsalia, for all that; and Hannibal, I have heard, did not have matters entirely his own way at Zama. Good men have been beaten before this. So, without stopping to cry over spilt milk,—heyho!" he interpolated, with a grimace, "it was uncommonly sweet milk, though,—let's back to our tents and reckon up our wounds."