She raised her head now, and her eyes were blazing with wrath—righteous wrath, so intense that it made her forget their relative positions.
“You dare to repeat that to me, now, after—after all that has happened since that time?” she demanded.
“Miss Harlan,” he said calmly, deliberately, but not unkindly, “I have brought you here by force, if you will, in order that I might say it—in order that I might continue saying it, over and over again, day after day. I am an outlaw now. I know it; but I am still a gentleman. I——”
“A gentleman, indeed!” she interrupted him. “Thank God that word has a different meaning in America than it does where you were born. A gentleman! Say rather an impostor, a swindler, a bogus count, a thief!”
The man winced as if he had received a blow, and his face went deadly white, like the waxen face of a corpse. For a moment even his lips seemed bloodless, and his fingers clinched into the palms of his hands until the manicured nails drew blood where he dug them into his flesh.
But he made no other motion.
He stood like a statue before her. He seemed scarcely to breathe; and for more than a full minute he did not speak.
“I have expected something very like that from you,” he said, at last, in a voice in which the effort to remain calm was plainly apparent. “In a measure I have schooled myself to hear it; but I did not know how hard it would be—how terrible it would sound from your lips. If I had known that, I almost doubt if I would have brought you here at all, Miss Harlan.
“At least I am not an impostor,” he resumed, after another pause. “I am the Count of Cadillac, whatever else I may happen to be. My family is among the oldest of Anjou. My ancestors count back into the Dark Ages almost, among the oldest, the best, the bravest, and the most honorable.
“Nor am I a swindler, Miss Harlan. I do not think you thought that, even when you said it.