“Consider me the exception,” he hurried to explain. “I never loved but once, and then would die for it.” The jasmine trembled in its chaste white nunnery, and her lips were temptingly apart. He bent forward boldly, searching her provoking eyes.
“She is the lucky lady!” said Olivia in a low voice, and then a pause. She trifled with her book.
“What I wonder is that you could have a word to say of plea for this that surely is the blackest of his kind.”
“Not admirable, by my faith! no; not admirable,” he confessed, “but I would be the last to blame him for intemperately loving you. There, I think his honesty was beyond dispute; there he might have found salvation. That he should have done me the honour to desire my removal from your presence was flattering to my vanity, and a savage tribute to your power, Mademoiselle Olivia.”
“Oh!” cried Olivia, “you cannot deceive me, Count Victor. It is odd that all your sex must stick up for each other in the greatest villanies.”
“Not the greatest, Mademoiselle Olivia,” said Count Victor with an inclination; “he might have been indifferent to your charms, and that were the one thing unforgivable. But soberly, I consider his folly scarce bad enough for the punishment of your eternal condemnation.”
“This man thinks lightly indeed of me,” thought Olivia. “Drimdarroch has a good advocate,” said she shortly, “and the last I would have looked for in his defence was just yourself.”
“Drimdarroch?” he repeated, in a puzzled tone.
“Will you be telling me that you do not know?” she said. “For what did Simon MacTaggart harass our household?”
“I have been bold enough to flatter myself; I had dared to think—”