'You are a good actress. Do not neglect your calling. Rise and go. You have been too long maintained by Count Othmar to be able to play the rôle of disinterested innocence with any chance of duping me. Why you come to me I cannot tell. Perhaps he sent you, teaching you your part.'
Damaris rose to her feet, and her face grew scarlet with honest shame and with indignant wonder.
'I have never had anything of his except his kindness,' she said passionately. 'I have never taken a coin from him any more than I took yours in the street to-day. What he did for me in my illness I know was charity—a debt I could never pay—I said so. But what I have lived on has been my own, always my own, what my grandfather left to me when he died.'
For the moment even her listener believed her; her candid luminous eyes flashing fire through their tears, her flushed indignant face, her truthful voice, all bore their witness to her innocence and ignorance, all told even the prejudice and arrogance of her judge, that whatever the facts might be she herself believed the truth to be that which she said.
Mercy and generosity for a moment held the lips of Nadine silent; she was a child, she was a peasant, if she were the dupe of her lover, was hers the fault? But that jealous scorn which has no pity and no justice in it, swept over her soul afresh, and extinguished in her all the finer charities and nobler comprehension of her mind.
'It is useless to tell me this,' she said with cold contempt. 'Whether you know it or not, your grandfather left you nothing; you are living, and you have lived, only on what my husband has given you. Leave me, and try my patience no more. Count Othmar's amours are nothing to me, but I do not care to have a comedy made out of them to be played for some unknown purpose on my credulity.'
Then she rang for her women.
Damaris said no other word, all the light and warmth had gone out of her face, there had come on it a pallid horror of incredulous and stupefied doubt.
Silently and quite feebly, as if all strength were gone out from her, she passed across the chamber, and felt her way through the curtains of the door. On the entrance she turned her head and looked back: her great eyes had the look in them of a forest doe's when it is wounded unto death. She looked back once, then went.
Nadine smiled bitterly.