“I want to get to my father,” she said, still hesitating.
“He is in Brussels. I will take you to him—on one condition,” and he placed his hand upon her arm and looked earnestly into her pale, agitated countenance.
“What condition?” she inquired, starting quickly at his touch. He made conditions, even in that hour of direst peril! Dinant was aflame, and hundreds of innocent people were now being murdered by the Kaiser’s Huns.
“The condition, Aimée,” he said, looking straight into her eyes very seriously, “is that you will become my wife.”
“Your wife, M’sieur Rigaux—never!”
“You refuse?” he cried, a brutal note in his hard voice. “You refuse, Mademoiselle,” he added threateningly—“and so you prefer to remain here, in the hands of the soldiery. They will have but little respect for the daughter of the Baron de Neuville, I assure you.”
She turned upon him fiercely, like a tigress, retorting:
“Those men, assassins as they have proved themselves to be, will have just as much respect for me as you yourself have—you, a traitor who, though a Belgian, are now wearing a Prussian uniform?”
The man laughed in her face, and she saw in his countenance a fierce, fiendish, even terrible expression such as she had never seen there before. Gradually it was beginning to dawn upon her that this man who could move backwards and forwards through the opposing lines, dressed as a German officer, must be a spy.
“Very well,” he said. “If you so desire, I will leave you to your fate—the wretched fate of those women who have just been driven out from here. The enemy has set his hand heavily upon you at last,” he laughed. “And you Belgians may expect neither pity nor respect.”