“With ingratitude, and cunning.”
“Before God, I do not blame her.”
He stood motionless a moment, looking down on Ursula with such fierce contempt, that, like many stupid people, she wondered how the offence had risen. Her eyes dilated when Aymery drew his sword. Her mouth opened to call the nuns who waited in the passage, but his laugh reassured her, the laugh that a man bestows on a thing beneath his strength.
“Madame,” he said, “you have nothing to fear from me but the truth. You see this sword of mine”—and he held the hilt towards her, grasping it by the blade.
Ursula stared at him as a timid gentlewoman might stare at a rat.
“That hilt is in the form of a cross, madame; I would beg you to look at it. You may have heard that the Cross has some significance for Christians.”
Ursula began to recover her dignity. It was borne in upon her suddenly that this man had stern eyes, and an ironical, mocking mouth. And Ursula began to dislike those eyes of his.
“Your words are beyond me, messire,” and her normal frostiness struggled to pervade the atmosphere.
Aymery looked at her as a man might look at something that was very repulsive and very ugly.
“Madame,” he said quietly, “if you have slain a soul, God forgive you; there are so many fools in the world, and so many of them are godly. There was no sin in Denise that called for the sponge full of vinegar, the scourge, and the spear.”