'Why did you not tell me this before?'
'I preferred to wait so as to make sure of not going supperless. It may, of course, offend you that I should have communicated my suspicions to her highness. But the poor lady was so downcast by your inaction, that to cheer her I ventured the opinion that you are perhaps not quite so aimless as you wish to appear.'
Whatever his convent education may have done for him, it does not seem—as you will long since have gathered—that it had inculcated a strict regard for exactitude. Dissimulation, I fear, was bred in the bones of him; although he would have answered any such charge by informing you that Plato had taught him to distinguish between the lie on the lips and the lie in the heart.
'Oh, but proceed! The opinion?' Barbaresco fiercely challenged him.
'You'll remember what Count Spigno said before you others checked him. The arbalester ... You remember.' Bellarion appeared to falter a little under the glare of those blue eyes and the fierce set of that heavy jaw. 'So I told her highness, to raise her drooping spirits, that one of these fine days her friends in Casale might cut the Gordian knot with a crossbow shaft.'
Barbaresco suggested by his attitude a mastiff crouching for a spring.
'Ah!' he commented. 'And she said?'
'The very contrary of what I expected. Where I looked for elation, I found only distress. It was in vain I pleaded with her that thus a consummation would speedily be reached; that if such a course had not yet been determined, it was precisely the course that I should advocate.'
'Oh! You pleaded that! And she?'
'She bade me tell you that if such a thing were indeed in your minds, you must dismiss it. That she would be no party to it. That sooner she would herself denounce the intention to the Marquis Theodore.'