The last words have the accent of an interrogation, of an appeal.
"That is to say a great deal," replies Xenia Sabaroff: she is startled, astonished, troubled; she was not expecting any such entire avowal.
"Many men must have said as much to you who have more to recommend them than I. Say something to me: what will you say?"
She does not immediately reply; she looks on the ground, and absently traces patterns on the path with the end of her long walking-stick.
"Do you know," she says, at last, after a silence which seems to him endless, "do you know that there are people who believe that I have been the délaissée of Lord Gervase? They do not phrase it so roughly, but that is what they say."
Brandolin's very lips are white, but his voice does not falter for one moment as he answers, "They will not say it in my hearing."
"And, knowing that they say it, you would still offer me your name?"
"I do so."
"And you would ask me nothing save what I choose to tell you?"
The sunny air seems to turn round with him for an instant: his brain grows dizzy; his heart contracts with a sickening pain; but in the next moment a great wave of strong and perfect faith in the woman he cares for lifts his soul up on it, as a sea-wave lifts a drowning man to land.