“To make you realize to the full the injustice that you did. To make you understand the wrongs for which you are called to pay. To prevent you from conceiving yourself a martyr; to make you perceive in all its deadly bitterness that what now comes to you is the inevitable fruit of your own faithlessness.”
“Sir Oliver, do you think me a fool?” she asked him.
“Madam, I do—and worse,” he answered.
“Ay, that is clear,” she agreed scornfully, “since even now you waste breath in attempting to persuade me against my reason. But words will not blot out facts. And though you talk from now till the day of judgment no word of yours can efface those bloodstains in the snow that formed a trail from that poor murdered body to your own door; no word of yours can extinguish the memory of the hatred between him and you, and of your own threat to kill him; nor can it stifle the recollection of the public voice demanding your punishment. You dare to take such a tone as you are taking with me? You dare here under Heaven to stand and lie to me that you may give false gloze to the villainy of your present deed—for that is the purpose of your falsehood, since you asked me what purpose there could be for it. What had you to set against all that, to convince me that your hands were clean, to induce me to keep the troth which—God forgive me!—I had plighted to you?”
“My word,” he answered her in a ringing voice.
“Your lie,” she amended.
“Do not suppose,” said he, “that I could not support my word by proofs if called upon to do so.”
“Proofs?” She stared at him, wide-eyed a moment. Then her lip curled. “And that no doubt was the reason of your flight when you heard that the Queen’s pursuivants were coming in response to the public voice to call you to account.”
He stood at gaze a moment, utterly dumbfounded. “My flight?” he said. “What fable’s that?”
“You will tell me next that you did not flee. That that is another false charge against you?”