“Pardon me. We are strangers. If I ask anything of you for myself, I should expect a refusal. But I ask it for humanity, to which we all owe help. Only hear what I have to say. I do not claim it as a right, but as a favor.”
Celestine sat down. “I listen,” she said. She turned her chair from Watts and faced Peter, as he stood at the study table.
Peter paused a moment, and then said: “After what I have seen, I feel sure you wish only to revenge yourself on Mr. D’Alloi?”
“Yes.”
“Now let me show you what you will do. For the last two days Mr. D’Alloi has carried a pistol in his pocket, and if you disgrace him he will probably shoot himself.”
“Bon!”
“But where is your revenge? He will be beyond your reach, and you will only have a human life upon your conscience ever after.”
“I shall not grieve!”
“Nor is that all. In revenging yourself on him, you do one of the cruelest acts possible. A wife, who trusts and believes in him, will have her faith and love shattered. His daughter—a young girl, with all her life before her—must ever after despise her father and blush at her name. Do not punish the weak and innocent for the sin of the guilty!” Peter spoke with an earnestness almost terrible. Tears came into his eyes as he made his appeal, and his two auditors both rose to their feet, under the impulse of his voice even more than of his words. So earnest was he, and so spell-bound were the others, that they failed to hear the door from the dining-room move, or notice the entrance of Mrs. D’Alloi as Peter ended his plea.
A moment’s silence followed Peter’s outburst of feeling. Then the Frenchwoman cried: