"Why should I go there?"
"Because your little friend Claudine d'Arny will see that you do."
"Oh, that was only an acquaintance on the ship. I had forgotten her."
"My memory is better. I have been chewing her father's name for twenty years."
"Do you know him, then?"
It was his turn to laugh—with the silent anger of a man who remembers.
"He gave the order for my father to be shot. I don't think I'll forget him."
She hardly believed him to be serious. There he stood, smiling softly, one hand deep in his trousers pocket, the other toying with his roses. He had just told her what he would have told no other woman in England, and she thought him a jester.
"Is this one of the fables?"
"Certainly it is. I am going to Paris to write the moral."