She was silent quite a long time, as if she had not heard him. Then,
"Do you not know," she said, "that the Countess of Rochechouart can have but one friend--her husband?"
He winced. She was right; but if that was her feeling, why had she complained of the lack of friends?
"Only one friend, her husband," the Countess continued softly. "If you would be that friend--but perhaps you would not, Roger? Still, if you would, I say, you must be kind to her ever and gentle to her. You must not leave her alone in woods on dark nights. You must not slight her. You must not,"--she was half laughing, half crying, and hanging towards him in the darkness, her childish hands held out in a gesture of appeal, irresistible had he seen it--but it was dark, or she had not dared--"you must not make anything too hard for her!"
He stepped one pace from her, shaking.
"I dare not! I dare not!" he said.
"Not if I dare?" she retorted gently. "Not if I dare, who am a coward? Are you a coward, too, that when you have said so much and I have said so much you will still leave me alone and unprotected, and--and friendless? Or is it that you do not love me?"
"Not love you?" Roger cried, in a tone that betrayed more than a volume of words had told. And beaten out of his last defence by that shrewd dilemma, he threw his pride to the winds; he sank down beside her, and seized her hands and carried them to his lips--lips that were hot with the fever of sudden passion. "Not love you, mademoiselle? Not love you?"
"So eloquent!" she murmured, with a last flicker of irony. "He does not even now say that he loves me. It is still his friendship, I suppose, that he offers me."
"Mademoiselle!"