Léon protested eagerly, how could she have had such an idea? One did not go about playing with young and innocent women who were unhappy. She must not do him so much injustice.
He talked for five minutes nobly and eloquently about unhappy young married women. Madame Gérard listened, looking between the wistaria branches towards the sea. When he had quite finished she said gently, “And yet it was a plot between you and my husband--your friendship, your attention to me--they were not very real, Monsieur. You had agreed with him to win me over to his wishes. Is that not so?”
Léon was upset. You can never be sure what a husband will not tell a wife, even an estranged and angry husband. There is a terrible habit of indiscriminate confidence in marriage. Léon had come across it before.
He would have eagerly denied conjecture, but it would not do to deny a confidence; besides he was secretly much relieved at this new version of things. He had been afraid that Madame had been playing with him; it appeared now that he had been playing with her. What had happened yesterday was merely a charming little feminine revanche. He began to find the part he was playing more attractive.
“It is true,” he said at last, “your husband told me that your marriage was not happy--and to begin with perhaps I had the idea that it lay with you to make it so. Forgive me, this idea soon passed. It passed before the affair of the other day showed me the incredible lacheté of Raoul. Permit me to say that his behavior shocked me to the heart; but before this shock took place I had learned in what light to consider you. Believe me, I have not been playing with you. I am in earnest, in terrible earnest.”
She turned her eyes to his. They were not beautiful eyes like Rose’s--but he did not know them so well, besides she used them better. “You are really in earnest, really, Léon?” she asked him searchingly. He sprang to his feet, but with a wave of her hand she motioned to him to remain where he was.
“I wonder,” she said very softly. “I do not want to be twice deceived, to be deceived once is to go broken-winged through life, but to be deceived twice, could one live at all?”
“I swear that I have not deceived you--that I will never deceive you!” cried Léon passionately. “The feeling that I have for you is real--it is intense.”
Still he meant to stay at Capri; he hadn’t any idea of doing anything else.
“You are prepared,” she asked him, “to prove your words to me? You realize if I believe them what is at stake for me--and if you realize that, do you not think that I have the right to ask you for a proof?”