She could not continue to meet his accusing eyes. It seemed to her that if he urged her more her heart would burst. Yielding to the impulse of the hunted animal, she wrenched herself free and turned to run somewhere, anywhere, so that she might avoid his merciless inquisition. A harsh laugh fell on her ears, and nothing more effective to put a stop to her flight could have been devised.
"Name of a name!" he roared, "shall we not take our pictures? If we are false to all else, let us at least be true to our harmless daubs!"
The taunt was undeserved and glanced unheeded from the shield of the girl's utter misery. Perhaps because that was so, the Pole's next words were tender and soothing.
"Come, then, my Joan," he growled, "never shall it be said against me that I deserted a comrade in distress. I hoped to see you happily wedded. It was my fantasy that Alec and you would inaugurate a new line of monarchs and thus bring about the social revolution from an unexpected quarter. But I was mistaken. Holy blue! never was man so led astray since Eve strolled into the wrong orchard and brought Adam with her!"
By this time he had caught her. He held her arm, and began to stroke one of her hands softly as if she had shown symptoms of falling in a faint. "We will go, mignonne," he soothed her, "you and I, and none here shall know till we have crossed the frontier. Not even then will they guess what has become of us, unless you find it in your heart to leave some little word for Alec. You will do that? You will save him from despair, from the torture of doubt——"
"Oh, Felix, spare me!" she sobbed convulsively.
"But one must look squarely at the facts, mignonne. If you run away and give no sign, it can only be supposed that you have met with some evil fate. There are others than Alec who will think that disaster has befallen you, and they will have uneasy souls, and Alec will look into their guilty faces with the eyes of a wrathful lover, which at such times can be superhuman, terrible, heart piercing. There is no knowing whose blood will stain his hands then; for he will accept from no one but yourself the assurance that you have left him of your own free will."
"That, at least, is true," she said wearily. "I shall write a letter which must be given to him when I am gone."
"Grand Dieu! what a resolute will is yours, Joan! Have you counted the cost? Leave Alec out of it; but do you think his hog of a father, his easily swayed mother, Stampoff, the short sighted and patriotic, or that scheming Greek and his puppet Marulitch, will gain the ends for which, between them, they have contrived your flight? Do you know Alec so little as to believe that he will leave the field clear to that crew? Why, dear heart, he will sweep them aside like an angry god! They have bewitched your brain with some tale of the evil that will accrue to the King if he weds the woman he loves. If that is all, it is a fiction fit only to frighten a child. Hear me, Joan! You are not helping Alec by tearing yourself away from Delgratz; but condemning to the deepest hell not him alone but some millions of people who have done no wrong. They gave their honest affections to this boy, because he strikes their imagination as a King sent straight from Heaven. It is a vile plot, dear heart, to drive Alec from Kosnovia. How can you, of all women, lend yourself to it?"
Felix could not guess how his words lacerated the unhappy girl's soul; but she did not falter in her purpose, and again endeavored to rush from the church. Poluski uttered a queer click with his tongue. It testified that he had done his uttermost and failed.