Fantômas bit his lips and his eyes fell, while Lady Beltham demanded in a questioning, defiant tone:
“And why should I not have told the princess who you were?”
Receiving no answer, she proceeded, smiling in her turn with a show of scornful dignity:
“You are afraid, it seems, that knowing you in your true aspect, she might cease to feel for you the fatal infatuation that consumes her? Poor princess! poor pitiful passion!... what matter the faults, the vices of the man a woman loves, when she truly loves him? Fantômas,” the sobs were rising to her lips as she went on, “I ask you, have your villainies, have your crimes silenced in me the fond feelings I entertain for you? Have I, for all the hideous life of blood and terror I live because of you, have I ceased to love you?”
Fantômas broke in:
“You profess to love me, madam, to love me still, and yet you harass me with your threats....”
Lady Beltham interrupted in her turn:
“Hate, Fantômas, is it not another form of love?”
But the outlaw shook his head sadly.
“Madam,” he declared, “I have lost all confidence; trusting to appearances, you have doubted my loyalty—I have proof of it, I know it; perhaps your distrustful attitude has gone for much in that I have shown towards you....”