What would she have said had she known that he had been on the road to Varenac with a vastly different purpose in his heart?
But an hour had changed his resolves. The brief struggle with the cur who would wreak a paltry revenge on an innocent girl had helped to show him what underlay the gaudy picture which Marcel Trouet had painted so often for him and his comrades in England.
He could read the writing on the wall in another language this side of the Channel.
With a low bow he offered the little Royalist champion his hand.
"As you say, Mademoiselle," he answered softly, "we must return to Kérnak. Afterwards I will go to my people."
"Yes," she smiled, "when Jéhan comes. I think he would bid us wait for him, Monsieur. He knows the men of Varenac, and it would be easier did you go together."
But Morice Conyers was thinking too deeply to reply to those last words.
Was it that the shadow of the "widow" was already on his heart?—the cry of the Terror's victims already ringing in his ears?