"If you are," I replied resolutely, meeting his eyes, "I decline to travel with you."
"And therefore," he retorted, "Madame, whose carriage this is, must not travel with me!"
"No, since she cannot travel without me," I answered with spirit.
He frowned at that; but in a moment, "And why?" he said with a sneer. "Am I not good enough for your excellency's company?"
"It is not a question of goodness," I said bluntly, "but of a passport, Monsieur. If you ask me, I do not travel with you because I hold a commission under the present Government, and I believe you to be working against that Government. I have lied for Madame St. Alais and her daughter. She was a woman and I had to save her. But I will not lie for you, nor be your cloak. Is that plain, Monsieur?"
"Quite," he said slowly. "Yet I serve the King. Whom do you serve?"
I was silent.
"Whose is this commission, Monsieur, that must not be contaminated?"
I writhed under the sneer, but I was silent.
"Come, M. le Vicomte," he continued frankly, and in a different tone. "Be yourself, I pray. I am Froment, you have guessed it. I am also a fugitive, and were my name spoken in Villeraugues, a league on, I should hang for it. And in Ganges the like. I am at your mercy, therefore, and I ask you to shelter me. Let me pass through Suméne and Ganges as one of your party; thenceforth onwards," he added with a smile and a gesture of conscious pride, "I can shift for myself."