Hortense was silent a moment, looking at the sea with swollen eyes.
'Louis,' she said at last, 'we were speaking metaphorically: I have half a mind to drown myself literally.'
'Nonsense!' replied Louis; 'an accused pleads 'not guilty,' and hangs himself in prison. What do the papers say? People talk, do they? Can't you talk as well as they? A woman is in the wrong from the moment she holds her tongue and refuses battle. And that you do too often. That pocket handkerchief is always more or less of a flag of truce.'
'I'm sure I don't know,' said Hortense indifferently; 'perhaps it is.'
There are moments of grief in which certain aspects of the subject of our distress seems as irrelevant as matters entirely foreign to it. Her eyes were still fastened on the sea. There was another silence. 'O my poor Charles!' she murmured, at length, 'to what a hearth do you return!'
'Hortense,' said the gentleman, as if he had not heard her, although, to a third person, it would have appeared that it was because he had done so that he spoke: 'I do not need to tell you that it will never happen to me to betray our secret. But I will answer for it that so long as M. Bernier is at home no mortal shall breathe a syllable of it.'
'What of that?' sighed Hortense. 'He will not be with me ten minutes without guessing it.'
'Oh, as for that,' said her companion, dryly, 'that's your own affair.'
'Monsieur de Meyrau!' cried the lady.
'It seems to me,' continued the other, 'that in making such a guarantee, I have done my part of the business.'