“Mademoiselle,” I said, speaking in the natural tones of that good-for-naught Gaston de Luynes, “I have already decided, and you have my permission to accompany your father.”
At the sound of my voice she started, and with her left hand clutching at the region of her heart, she stood, her head thrust forward, and on her face the look of one who is confronted with some awful doubt. That look was brief, however, and swift to replace it was one of hideous revelation.
“In God's name, who are you?” she cried in accents that bespoke internal agony.
“Already you have guessed it, Mademoiselle,” I answered, and I would have added that which should have brought comfort to her distraught mind, when—
“You!” she gasped in a voice of profound horror. “You! You, the Judas who has sold my father to the Cardinal for a paltry share in our estates. And I believed that mask of yours to hide the face of St. Auban!”
Her words froze me into a stony mass of insensibility. There was no logic in my attitude; I see it now. Appearances were all against me, and her belief no more than justified. I overlooked all this, and instead of saving time by recounting how I came to be there and thus delivering her from the anguish that was torturing her, I stood, dumb and cruel, cut to the quick by her scorn and her suspicions that I was capable of such a thing as she imputed, and listening to the dictates of an empty pride that prompted me to make her pay full penalty.
“Oh, God pity me!” she wailed. “Have you naught to say?”
Still I maintained my mad, resentful silence. And presently, as one who muses—
“You!” she said again. “You, whom I—” She stopped short. “Oh! The shame of it!” she moaned.
Reason at last came uppermost, and as in my mind I completed her broken sentence, my heart gave a great throb and I was thawed to a gentler purpose.