"Oh, I have done much for him, and he cannot refuse me any request that it is in his power to grant," I said, truly enough.
"Then," she went on, "the tie is one of obligation, rather than of great friendship?"
"Yes. I have often been in a position to do him great services when no one else was, and when he most needed them. As for my feeling of friendship for him, I shall not even weep when he is dead."
"Suppose you should love a woman," she continued, with a strange eagerness, "and there should come a time when you would have to choose between your love for her, and your friendship for this man, which would prevail?"
"I would sacrifice La Tournoire for the woman I loved," I answered, with truth.
She looked at me steadily, and a hope seemed to dawn in her eyes, but in a moment they darkened again; she sighed deeply, and she turned to ascend to her chamber, while I stood there trying to deduce a meaning from her strange speeches and conduct, which I finally put down to the capaciousness of woman. I could understand the feeling that she ought to part from a man who loved her and whom her religion forbade her to love in return; but why she should seem pleased at the apparent lukewarmness of my friendship for La Tournoire, whom she was willing to accept as her guide, I could not guess. Since she intended to part from me, never to see me again, what mattered it to her whether or not I was the intimate of a proscribed ruffian? Yet she seemed glad to hear that I was not, but this might be only seeming. I might not have read her face and tone aright. Her inquiries might have been due to curiosity alone. So I thought no more of them, and gave my mind instead to planning how she might be made to ignore the difference between our religions, and to revoke the edict banishing me from her side. It would be necessary that she should be willing to remain at Maury, with a guard composed of some of my men, while I, giving a pretext for delaying the flight and for the absence of myself and the most of my company, should attempt the delivery of her father from the château of Fleurier. It was my hope, though I dared not yet breathe it, that I might bring her father and my company back to Maury, and that all of us might then proceed to Guienne.
My meditations were interrupted by the return of Blaise from Maury, where he had found all well and the men there joyous at the prospect of soon rejoining the army in Guienne. A part of the company was absent on a foraging raid. Two of the roofed chambers were rapidly being made habitable for Mlle. de Varion, whom Blaise had announced to the men as a distinguished refugee.
When supper was ready in the kitchen, I sent Jeannotte to summon her mistress. Mademoiselle came down from her chamber, her sweet face betokening a brave attempt to bear up under the many woes that crushed her,—the condition of her father, her own exile, the peril in which she stood of the governor's reconsidering his order and sending to make her prisoner, the seeming necessity of exchanging my guidance for that of a stranger who had been painted to her in repulsive colors, and the other unhappy elements of her situation.
"It is strange that the boy, Pierre, has not returned," I said, while we sat at table.
Mademoiselle reddened. It then occurred to me that, in her abstraction, she had not even noticed his absence, and that now it came on her as a new trouble.