In the evening Ombreval sent word that he wished to speak to her—and that his need was urgent. But she returned him the answer that she would see him in the morning. She was indisposed that evening, she added, in apology.
And in the morning they met, as she had promised him. Both pale, although from different causes, and both showing signs of having slept but little. They broke their fast together and in silence, which at last he ended by asking her whether the night had brought her reflection, and whether such reflection had made her appreciate their position and the need to set out at once.
“It needed no reflection to make me realise our position better than I did yesterday,” she answered. “I had hoped that it would have brought you to a different frame of mind. But I am afraid that it has not done so.”
“I fail to see what change my frame of mind admits of,” he answered testily.
“Have you thought,” she asked at last, and her voice was cold and concentrated, “that this man is giving his life for you?”
“I have feared,” he answered, with incredible callousness, “that to save his craven skin he might elect to do differently at the last moment.”
She looked at him in a mighty wonder, her dark eyes open to their widest, and looking black by the extreme dilation of the pupils. So vast was her amazement at this unbounded egotism that it almost overruled her disgust.
“You cast epithets about you and bestow titles with a magnificent unconsciousness of how well they might fit you.”
“Ah? For example?”
“In calling this man a craven, you take no thought for the cowardice that actuates you into hiding while he dies for you?”