The younger man frowned. “Come, come!” he said with impatience, “surely there is no need for concealment; it is not possible that she fears me.”
“She has retired into a privacy not unjustified by her mourning and her position,” the priest answered. “I cannot tell you more without violating my word.”
“Am I so hateful to her that she does not wish to see me?” exclaimed the other, in a pained tone.
Père Antoine smiled involuntarily as he shook his head.
“Nay,” he said, “but the wound is new, and the lightest touch hurts. You do not know, nor I, what she has had to bear.”
“One thing I do know,” Péron said, “she is free of a rogue;” and he told the priest of M. de Bièvre’s talk at Archambault’s.
“And you threw him over the table?” Père Antoine said slowly. “Well, my son, violence is not good; and yet you could do no less. He lied too, for mademoiselle herself set him free at the first tidings of her changed fortunes. It was a match of her father’s making, not hers, and I think that her deliverance from it is one bright spot in the dark clouds of trouble.”
“Yet you will not tell me where she is?” Péron said.
“I cannot,” the priest replied, with a smile.
“But I will find her, for all that,” the young musketeer declared firmly. “I will find her, if I have to scour Paris, from one end to the other; ay, if I have to scour all France!”