"Honour!" I reiterated contemptuously.
"Nay, don't interrupt me, and don't repeat my words if you please," he replied, grinding his sharp teeth; "honour and retributive justice were my guides and my incentives. The honour of a husband whom she had deserted—the vengeance of France, whom she had betrayed. Love and revenge are two fingers of the same hand."
"By Heaven, Colonel Rouvigny, she was a thousand times better and purer than the mother who, for her sins, encumbered the earth with such a being as you."
"Very probably," he continued in his bantering manner, while whiffing his cigar, and while the savage gleam in his eyes belied the affected suavity of his manner; "but my most choleric friend, have the kindness to remember that she was mine by marriage——"
"A marriage!—a foul snare, which she abhorred, and by which her happiness was withered, her future blasted."
"Sang Dieu! she told you all this?"
"Yes," said I, with a cutting smile.
"Well—did this entitle her to betray France?"
"She was, like her father, true to France and France's ancient line of kings."
"Tyrants and gluttons, with whom the men of the new world had done."