"When," exclaimed De Beaurepaire, "you can put me face to face with a credible witness who can testify to having ever heard me utter any such expression, I will answer you before him. But not till then."
"Madame," La Reynie said now to Emérance, while intimating by a look towards the Prince that he had done with him, for the present at least, "Madame, give me your attention. What is your relationship with the last witness?"
"I love him," Emérance answered, lifting her eyes slowly towards her questioner. "No more nor less than that."
"You misapprehend me. I mean as regards his, and your, participation in this plot?"
"There was no plot," Emérance replied again, this time with a cynical look upon her face; "or, at least, none against France or the King of France. Yet, it is true, there was a plot."
"You admit that?" D'Aligre exclaimed, bending forward over his cushions. "You admit it?"
As he asked the question he was not the only one in that Court who turned their eyes on the unhappy woman. In solemn truth, there were no eyes in that Court which did not rest on her now. The eyes of the Judges and the Procureur-Général, as well as those of her fellow prisoners.
"What is she about to say?" the man who loved her asked himself, while knowing full well that whatever she might say would not be aught that could harm him, though fearing at the same time that she might say something which would sacrifice her while shielding him. "What story, what scheme has she devised?"
"The she-cat, the tigress!" Van den Enden groaned inwardly. "She will save him and herself--curse her!--by sacrificing me. Yet, how? How?"
But still there was another prisoner who heard those words--Fleur de Mai. But he said nothing to himself and indulged in no speculation as to what the woman might be about to state. He was doomed, he knew: nothing could save him. There was for him but one hope left in this world; the hope that since, vagabond as he was, he was the off-shoot of an honourable family, he might perish by the axe and not the wheel, or that still deeper degradation, the rope.