The little Frenchman turned, bowing respectfully to the trembling, almost weeping, Ermengarde. "Madame," he said mournfully, "I regret deeply. One moment, and you are disembarrassed from the unwarrantable intrusion of this person. Go you, M. de Konski," he added, facing about with gestures of command, "before I hurl you to the depths below. Is it probable that I permit a stranger to molest with his undesired presence a lady who honours me with her acquaintance and commands my protection?"
"No more of that, de Vieuxbois," came the stern retort. "You have annoyed this lady more than enough. Off with you."
"And pray, M. de Konski," demanded M. Isidore, with flaming glance and fierce accent, "what is Madame to you, that you thus arrogantly dare to essay to chase people from her presence?"
"Oh, not much," the Anarchist replied bitterly—"not much. Only—only a—connexion—by marriage."
At this moment a wild cry from the distressed lady, followed by the sudden and precipitate descent of the Anarchist's beard down the ravine, a similar flight of his broad felt hat and goggles in the same direction, sequent on the uprising from her rocky seat of Ermengarde, who, indeed, had initiated the movements of these things, with the terrified exclamation of "Arthur!" struck M. Isidore dumb with amazement for about the space of seven seconds, at the end of which he observed with a gentle smile, "Pardon, Monsieur, I was mistaken; I had not understood. The connexion appears to be somewhat intimate. I congratulate," and airily raising his hat, he slipped lightly up the path to where it was possible to scale the cliff, up which he sprang, vanishing in the clump of pines on the top.
Chapter XXI
Connexions by Marriage
Ermengarde always maintained afterwards that she had suspected the Anarchist's identity from the first, though this assertion scarcely agreed with the descriptions she had written of that baleful person in letters still extant.
She would have been more accurate in saying that the sudden exclamation of "Stop that!" in a perfectly undisguised and familiar voice had first conveyed a suspicion of the awful truth to her mind in a paroxysm of terror and bewilderment, and that not until the Anarchist's sarcastic assertion that she was only a connexion by marriage had the terrified suspicion become a dread certainty, and moved her to tear off his disguise.
"Well," said Arthur, standing grim and gaunt before her in his proper person, after the considerate departure of M. Isidore had left the connexions by marriage in possession of the field, dropping his cloak and looking some inches taller in consequence. "Well, Ermengarde?"