“I judge you only by your own words;” she answered steadily; “They condemn you more than I do. I thought you were sincere in your love for the People! I thought your work was all for them,—not for me! I judged that you sought to gain authority in order to remedy their many wrongs;—but if, after all, you have been fighting your way to power merely to make yourself, as you thought, more acceptable to me as a husband, you have deceived me in the honesty of your intentions as grossly as you have deceived the King!”
“The King!” he cried; “The King!”
She flashed a proud and passionate glance upon him—and then—he suddenly found himself alone. She had left the room; and though he knew there was only one wall, one door between them, he dared not follow.
Glancing around him at the simple furniture of the chamber he stood in, which, though only an attic, was bright and fresh and sweet, with bunches of wildflowers set here and there in simple and cheap crystal vases, he sighed heavily. The poor and ‘obscure’ life was perhaps, after all, the highest, holiest and best! All at once his eyes lighted on one large cluster of flowers that were neither wild nor common, a knot of rare roses and magnificent orchids, tied together with a golden ribbon. He looked at them jealously, and his soul was assailed by sudden resentment and suspicion. His face changed, his teeth closed hard on his under lip, and he clenched his hand unconsciously.
“If it is so—if it should be so!” he muttered; “There may be yet another and more complete Day of Fate!”
He left the room then, descending the stairs more rapidly than he had climbed them, and as he went out of the house and up the street, he stumbled against Paul Zouche.
“Whither away, brave Deputy?” cried this irresponsible being; “Whither away? To rescue the poor and the afflicted?—or to stop the King from poaching on your own preserves?”
With a force of which he was himself unconscious, he gripped Zouche by the arm.
“What do you mean?” he whispered thickly;—“Speak! What do you know?”
Zouche laughed stupidly.