‘I am here in search of you, M. de Barthe,’ she said, colouring slightly, perhaps because my eyes betrayed my thought; ‘to thank you. You have not fought, and yet you have conquered. My woman has just been with me, and she tells me that they are going.’
‘Going?’ I said, ‘Yes, Mademoiselle, they are leaving the house.’
She did not understand my reservation.
‘What magic have you used?’ she said almost gaily; it was wonderful how hope had changed her. ‘Besides, I am curious to learn how you managed to avoid fighting.’
‘After taking a blow?’ I said bitterly.
‘Monsieur, I did not mean that,’ she said reproachfully.
But her face clouded. I saw that, viewed in this light—in which, I suppose, she had not hitherto—the matter perplexed her more than before.
I took a sudden resolution.
‘Have you ever heard, Mademoiselle,’ I said gravely, plucking off while I spoke the dead leaves from a plant beside me, ‘of a gentleman by name De Berault? Known in Paris, I have heard, by the sobriquet of the Black Death?’
‘The duellist?’ she answered, looking at me in wonder. ‘Yes, I have heard of him. He killed a young gentleman of this province at Nancy two years back. ‘It was a sad story,’ she continued, shuddering slightly, ‘of a dreadful man. God keep our friends from such!’