“Forget them, for I should hate myself if you were to look on me as one who had plotted for your gratitude. Tiphaïne, I am just a man. I am thinking of you as the child who rescued me at Rennes.”
His words moved her more deeply than he imagined. She looked into his swarthy and impassioned face, and felt his homage leap up about her like sacred fire.
“If I might speak it?”
She faltered, and her cheeks were red, her eyes mysterious.
“No, no, not now—”
He went near to her, holding out his great, strong hands.
“I am a rough, ignorant fool, but—before God—I know now how to give you homage.”
“Bertrand, I know it—”
“Well—”
“Wait”—and she looked at him, and then at the hands he held to her—“I ask you to see the shadows that I see, the shadows that are darkening my own home.”