She stretched out the little hand and touched the gold lace upon Dunoisse’s sleeve, saying with a wistful smile:
“Borrowing degrades—even when one borrows from a woman. You see, I do not spare myself.... I borrowed from a man.”
Dunoisse’s small square white teeth were viciously set upon his lower lip. His black brows were knitted. His eyes were bent upon the carpet. He heard her say:
“A man who loved me.... Ah! what a coward I am, and how you must despise me! Who loves me, I should say!”
And the sentence was a knife in the heart of the poor dupe who heard. Words were wrenched from him with the sudden pain. He cried, before he could check himself:
“Who is the man?”
And then, meeting her look that conveyed: “You have no right to ask” ... he said with humility: “Forgive me! I was presumptuous and mad to ask that question. Forget that I ever did!”
She gauged him with a keen bright glance, and said with a noble, melancholy simplicity that was as pinchbeck as her abasement of the moment previous:
“You are very young, or you would never have committed so great an error. For if I loved him, I should never tell you for his sake, and if I loved you——”
She registered his start, and finished: