"Madame, I am most deeply grateful to you. If----"
"Nay; gratitude is due from me to you. Yet what was it you said but now? That you had an ancient enemy who recognised you at Antwerp. If so, may he not follow you here?"
"I think not. At St. Trond he appeared again, only to again disappear. Some evil may have befallen him, though not at my hands. He would have denounced me by daybreak had that not happened."
"So be it then. Let us go forward. Once in Liége you will doubtless be safe. If 'tis not so, then you must rely on Heaven, which has watched over you so far, to do so still. Where have you dreamt of sojourning when you are there? At the house where dwells this lady you go to seek and help?"
"Nay; that cannot be. I have never seen her since she was a child. Her father is dead. I know not in what part of the city she dwells. I must seek some inn----"
"No, no. I have kinsmen and kinswomen there of your faith. Their houses shall be--nay, will be, freely at your service. Speak but the word and it shall be so."
For a moment Bevill Bracton pondered over this gracious offer, while, even as he did so, he raised the gloved hand of the Comtesse to his lips and murmured words of thanks for her politeness. But after a moment's reflection he decided not to accept this offer.
He recognised at once that he ought not to do so; that the acceptance of that offer would be unwise. For he knew, or, at least, he had a presentiment, that from the moment he reached Sylvia Thorne his duty must be dangerous; that what he had promised the Lord Peterborough-- ay! and also promised to do at all cost, all risk--might put him in peril of his life. He had known this ere he set out from England; he knew it doubly now. The French were all about and everywhere. Even during the next hour or so he would have to pass through a portion of that army to enter the city that lay before them. The difficulty of leaving it would be increased twofold--tenfold, when he had with him for charge a young girl, a young woman, who was also an English subject.
"Therefore," he mused, or rather decided quickly, while still the Comtesse de Valorme awaited his answer, "I must be unhampered; above all, untrammelled in my movements. God alone knows with what dangers, what difficulties, it may please Him to environ me; but be that as it may, I must at all hazards be free and at liberty to either face or avoid them. Courtesy, that courtesy as much due from guest to host as from host to guest, could not be freely testified in such circumstances as these. The quality of guest would not be fairly enacted by me. I should be but a sorry inhabitant of any man's house!"
Therefore, in very courteous phrases, conveying many thanks, he spoke these thoughts aloud to the Comtesse, while begging that the rejection of her offer might not be taken ill by her.