“I will tell you,” she said, “how it came about. He had been in an English prison before the war; he had made himself responsible for another man’s rogueries. After the war he did not wish to return to England, but he desired to begin life again as a Frenchman. He came to Beaucourt where he had buried his friend, and here we met again, by chance—for he had billeted himself in my cellar.”
She held the crowd on the most delicate of threads, and instinctively she made haste to strengthen it.
“Many of you will ask me why I trusted him, a man who was a deserter, and almost a stranger to me. I will tell you.
“He had helped me to bury my treasure. When I returned to Beaucourt, it was still there. . . .
“He intended to go away; it was I who asked him to stay. . . .
“He told me the whole truth from the very beginning, and when we realized that we loved each other, and that he wished to marry me and remain in Beaucourt, he told the truth to Messieurs Lefèbre and Durand, and this very week he was to have surrendered himself to the English in order that our marriage might be honest and clean.”
It was Bibi who interrupted her, and it was this very interruption that gave her the inspiration that she needed.
“It is rather late in the day—to marry.”
She turned to Bibi with a calm frankness.
“You hear what this man says? I will answer him. Had I given my whole self to my betrothed, would Louis Blanc be the man to accuse me of shame? But it is not so.”