“But why did you not give me the paper at Versailles—you came to me as Yvonne—you——”
“If I had given you the paper at Versailles should I have been here now? I loved my life a little then—I did not know my brother’s fate.”
And Denise had no answer but a shiver of mute assent.
“You have forgotten my brother, who was to come here to meet me that we might fly together; you have also forgotten the Vicomte, to whom that despatch was a necessity, and you have forgotten yourself, Mademoiselle. Could my brother, who loved you, have wished that you should at Versailles have been proved to have stolen what you had tried to steal? You have forgotten Madame de Pompadour. Would she or the King have believed your story that a peasant girl had given you the despatch?” She paused for a moment. “Would the Vicomte have believed it?”
“André?” Denise cried passionately. “How dare you?”
“There was only one way,” the girl continued, quietly ignoring that cry of love’s conviction, “to save you from the trap into which your enemies had lured you, and that was to bring the Vicomte and yourself here. My brother would have wished it, and I am glad that I tried and succeeded.”
She turned away; her voice showed that the wonderful strength of will which had sustained her was giving way at last.
“You did it,” Denise said after a long silence, “not for my sake, not wholly for your brother’s, but—because you love André.”
The girl, who had sunk on to the sofa, presently rose and crossed the room, and Denise, watching her as only one woman can watch another, shrank at the sight of that noble and pathetic beauty.
“Yes,” was the unfaltering answer, “I did it because I love André, because I alone can save him. Ah! it is not you, but I—I, who have saved him.”