“Aye,” she returned wistfully, “you are like the rest. You have a long memory for injuries, but a short one for benefits. Had it not been for me, Monsieur, you would not be here now to demand this that you call satisfaction. Have you forgotten how I—”
“No,” he broke in. “I well remember how you sought to stay them when they were flogging me in the yard there. But you came too late. You might have come before, for from the balcony above you had been watching my torture. But you waited overlong. I was cast out for dead.”.
She flashed him a searching glance, as though she sought to read his thoughts, and to ascertain whether he indeed believed what he was saying.
“Cast out for dead?” she echoed. “And by whose contrivance? By mine, M. la Boulaye. When they were cutting you down they discovered that you were not dead, and but that I bribed the men to keep it secret and carry you to Duhamel's house, they had certainly informed my father and you would have been finished off.”
His eyes opened wide now, and into them there came a troubled look—the look of one who is endeavouring to grasp an elusive recollection.
“Ma foi,” he muttered. “It seems to come to me as if I had heard something of the sort in a dream. It was—” He paused, and his brows were knit a moment. Then he looked up suddenly, and gradually his face cleared. “Why, yes—I have it!” he exclaimed. “It was in Duhamel's house. While I was lying half unconscious on the couch I heard one of the men telling Duhamel that you had paid them to carry me there and to keep a secret.”
“And you had forgotten that?” she asked, with the faintest note of contempt.
“Not forgotten,” he answered, “for it was never really there to be remembered. That I had heard such words had more than once occurred to me, but I have always looked upon it as the recollection of something that I had dreamt. I had never looked upon it as a thing that had had a real happening.”
“How, then, did you explain your escape?”
“I always imagined that I had been assumed dead.”