"It is too cold to stand here ... it will be wiser to walk a little. There is a path that leads us out near the wall at the bottom of the shrubbery."
It was where the mask of the Satyr, now with long icicles hanging from his eyebrows and goat-beard, jutted from the ivy of the boundary wall.
The little spring had not frozen, the ferns and grasses round its margin were still quite green. A few pinched violets peeped from among their broad leaves. Juliette stooped and gathered one or two of the faintly-fragrant blossoms and a leaf of fern and a sprig of ivy. As she slipped them into the inner pocket of her jacket, the Chancellor spoke:
"Mademoiselle, I have to thank you for my life..... Now, last night——" He squarely confronted her, his powerful eyes looking down upon the little figure so frail and slender. "Now, last night," he repeated, "had you really believed that my death meant the salvation of your country.... Well!... Did you not hold me in the hollow of your hand?"
She met his stern regard with a look that was clear as crystal. She said in her silver tones:
"It is true, Monseigneur. Our Lord granted me my wish. You so great, so strong, so powerful, were helpless as an infant.... I had only not to put out my finger—and you were a dead man! The power of Life and Death was mine, yet I could not let you perish, for Almighty God would not permit it.... He willed that you should not die.... Crush France or spare her, you will not be carrying out the wishes of Count Bismarck. You will do what God permits you to do—no more and no less! But when you are most strong and most powerful ... when you play with Kings and Emperors like pawns, then I ask you to remember Juliette de Bayard!"
She quivered in every limb, but she went on resolutely:
"You are not a good man, Monseigneur!... Hard, subtle, arrogant, cruel and unscrupulous, God made you to be the Fate of France. One day she will lift up her face from the mire into which you have trodden it, and the star will be burning unquenched upon her forehead. We may both be dead before that day dawns. But rest assured that when next your armies cross the Rhine they will not gain an easy victory!... We shall be prepared and ready, Monseigneur, when the Germans come again!"
He looked at her and listened to her in silence, perhaps in wonder. She seemed the Spirit of France incarnate, a pale reed shaken by prophetic winds from Heaven.
"It may be so," he said to her gravely. "And now, Mademoiselle de Bayard, I shall ask you to give me your hand at parting!"