"He must be set free, first," said Elizabeth. The manner of her speaking, her look as well as her tone, might almost have been taken for a rebuke. Madeline might pardon that.
"I have said so," she answered, mildly. "I have tried to move heaven and earth. I was but a feeble woman. Still it is a consolation to know that I have done everything my wit or my love could devise, and not stopped at what looked like extravagance or indelicacy. What further, Elizabeth? The man who is now in power, and through whom alone the king can be reached, will grant him liberty"—
"He will?"
"At a price that would take away its value from him."
"What is that price?"
"My life. He wants me for his wife,—a purchase, you perceive."
Elizabeth Montier did not heed the scorn and bitterness of these words, as Mlle. Desperiers spoke them. The blood in her veins seemed turning to fire,—it swept through her body and brain like the flood of a volcano,—and she thought, she who knew the prisoner's life, and all that captivity was to him,—
"Coward and selfish, that will not instantly give up her life for his!"
A very dismal satisfaction, that the woman he loved best should so prove unworthy of him! The horror of that satisfaction, its humiliation and its pain, sufficiently attested to the poor girl who endured it that her soul's integrity remained secure. As if for a personal conflict with an enemy, she started to her feet.
"It must not be!" she exclaimed.