"Not forgotten,"he answered, "for it was never really there to be remembered. That I had heard such words had more than once occurred to me, but I have always looked upon it as the recollection of something that I had dreamt. I had never looked upon it as a thing that had had a real happening."
"How, then, did you explain your escape?"
"I always imagined that I had been assumed dead."
There was a brief spell of silence. Then -"And now that you know, Monsieur - ?"
She left the question unfinished, and held out her hands to him in a gesture of supplication. His face paled slightly and overclouded.
Her influence, against which so long he had steeled himself, reinforced by the debt in which she had shown him that he stood towards her, was prevailing with him despite himself. Stirred suddenly out of the coldness that he had hitherto assumed, he caught the outstretched hands and drew her a step nearer. That was his undoing. Strong man though he unquestionably was, like many another strong man his strength seemed to fall from him at a woman's touch. He had led so austere and stern a life during the past four years; of women he had but had the most passing of glances, and intercourse with none save an old female who acted as his housekeeper in Paris. And here was a woman who was not only beautiful, but the woman who years ago had embodied all his notions of what was most perfect in womanhood; the woman who ever since, and despite all that was past, had reigned in his heart and mind almost in spite of himself, almost unknown to him.
The touch of her hand now, the closeness of her presence, the faint perfume that reached him from her, and that was to him as a symbol of her inherent sweetness, the large blue eyes meeting his in expectation, and the imploring half-pout of her lips, were all seductions against which he had not been human had he prevailed.
Very white in the intensity of the long-quiescent passion she had resuscitated, he cried:
"Mademoiselle, what shall I say to you?"
The four years that were gone seemed suddenly to have slipped away.
It was as if they stood again by the brook in the park on that April morn when first he had dared to word his presumptuous love. Even the vocabulary of the Republic was forgotten, and the interdicted title of "Mademoiselle" fell naturally from his lips.
"Say that you can be generous,"she implored him softly. "Say that you prefer the debt you owe to the injury you received."
"You do not know the sacrifice you ask," he exclaimed still fighting with himself. "I have waited four years for this, and now - "
"He is my brother," she whispered, in so wonderful a tone that words which of themselves may have seemed no argument at all became the crowning argument of her intercession.
"Soit!" he consented. "For your sake, Mademoiselle, and in payment of the debt I owe you, I will go as I came. I shall not see the Citizen-marquis again. But do you tell him from me that if he sets any value on his life, he had best shake the dust of France from his feet. Too long already has he tarried, and at any moment those may arrive who will make him emigrate not only out of France but out of the world altogether. Besides, the peasantry that has risen once may rise again, and I shall not be here to protect him from its violence. Tell him he had best depart at once."
