“A little. I know, for instance, that you murdered Escovedo—all the world knows that. Is that the imprudence of which you speak? I have heard it said that it was for love of a woman that you did it.”
“You have heard that, too?” he said. He had paled a little. “You have heard a deal, Marquise. I wonder would it amuse you to hear more, to hear from my own lips this story of mine which all Europe garbles? Would it?”
There was a faint note of anxiety in his voice, a look faintly anxious in his eyes.
She scanned him a moment gravely, almost inscrutably. “What purpose can it serve?” she asked; and her tone was forbidding—almost a tone of fear.
“It will explain,” he insisted.
“Explain what?”
“How it comes that I am not this moment prostrate at your feet; how it happens that I am not on my knees to worship your heavenly beauty; how I have contrived to remain insensible before a loveliness that in happier times would have made me mad.”
“Vive Dieu!” she murmured, half ironical. “Perhaps that needs explaining.”
“How it became necessary,” he pursued, never heeding the interruption, “that yesterday you should proclaim your disbelief that I could be, as you said, a Spaniard of Spain. How it happens that Antonio Perez has become incapable of any emotion but hate. Will you hear the story—all of it?”
He was leaning towards her, his white face held close to her own, a smouldering fire in the dark, sunken eyes that now devoured her.