“I know that my marriage would please you,” she said. “Mother gave me to understand that two months ago, therefore,”—and she paused as though she could not utter the words which were to decide her fate—“therefore I am willing to accept him.”
“Ah, Mary!” he exclaimed quickly, his face brightening, for her decision aroused hope within him. “I need not tell you what happiness your words bring to me. I confess to you that I have hoped that you would give your consent, for I would rather see you the wife of the count, with wealth and position, than married to any other man I know. He loves you—of that I am convinced. Has he never told you so?”
She did not answer for a few moments. She was reflecting upon that scene in the little salon in Rome when he had revealed himself to her in his true colours.
“Yes,” she answered at last in that same hard, colourless voice. “He told me so once.”
He attributed her blank, despairing look to the natural emotion of the moment. It was the great crisis of her young life, for she was deciding her future. He was in ignorance of how already she had made the compact with Dubard—of how she had decided to sacrifice herself in order to save him.
Her father, in ignorance of the truth of how nobly she was acting, went on to analyse the young Frenchman’s good qualities and relate to her all that he had learnt regarding him.
“His youth has been no better and no worse than that of any young man brought up in Paris,” he said, “yet from the information I have gathered it seems that he has sown his wild oats long ago, and for the past couple of years he has given up racing and gambling and all such vices of youth, and has become a perfect model of what a young man should be. Men who know him in Paris speak highly of him as a man of real grit—a man with a future before him. You do not think, Mary,” he went on, “that I should have welcomed him as a guest at my table if I were not sure that he was a man worthy the name of friend?”
“Ah!” she sighed, “you have, my dear father, sometimes been disappointed in your friendships, I fear. Angelo Borselli, for instance, has been your friend through many years.”
“Angelo!” he exclaimed impatiently. “Yes, yes, I know. But I am speaking of Jules—of the man you have consented to marry.”
A slight hardness showed at the corners of her mouth at mention of the man who had so cleverly entrapped her. She knew that escape was impossible. He could place her father in a position of triumph over his enemies, and in return claimed herself. Ah! if she could only speak the truth; if she could only take her father into her confidence, and show him the reason she so readily gave her consent to a union that was odious to her! Yet she knew that if she gave him the slightest suspicion of her self-sacrifice he would withhold his consent, and the result would be dire disaster.