Bardelys the Magnificent

"Then let me pass."

"Aye, when you have heard me."

"I do not wish to hear you. Nothing that you may say can matter to me. Oh, monsieur, if you have any instincts of gentility, if you have any pretension to be accounted anything but a mauvais sujet, I beg of you to respect my grief. You witnessed, yourself, the arrest of my father. This is no season for such as scene as you are creating."

"Pardon! It is in such a season as this that you need the comfort and support that the man you love alone can give you."

"The man I love?" she echoed, and from flushed that they had been, her cheeks went very pale. Her eyes fell for an instant, then--they were raised again, and their blue depths were offered me. "I think, sir," she said, through her teeth, "that your insolence transcends all belief."

"Can you deny it?" I cried. "Can you deny that you love me? If you can--why, then, you lied to me three nights ago at Toulouse!"

That smote her hard--so hard that she forgot her assurance that she would not listen to me--her promise to herself that she would stoop to no contention with me.

"If, in a momentary weakness, in my nescience of you as you truly are, I did make some such admission, I did entertain such feelings for you, things have come to my knowledge since then, monsieur, that have revealed you to me as another man; I have learnt something that has utterly withered such love as I then confessed. Now, monsieur, are you satisfied, and will you let me pass?" She said the last words with a return of her imperiousness, already angry at having been drawn so far.

"I am satisfied, mademoiselle," I answered brutally, "that you did not speak the truth three nights ago. You never loved me. It was pity that deluded you, shame that urged you--shame at the Delilah part you had played and at your betrayal of me. Now, mademoiselle, you may pass," said I.

And I stood aside, assured that as she was a woman she would not pass me now. Nor did she. She recoiled a step instead. Her lip quivered. Then she recovered quickly. Her mother might have told her that she was a fool for engaging herself in such a duel with me--me, the veteran of a hundred amorous combats. Yet though I doubt not it was her first assault-at-arms of this description, she was more than a match for me, as her next words proved.

"Monsieur, I thank you for enlightening me. I cannot, indeed, have spoken the truth three nights ago. You are right, I do not doubt it now, and you lift from me a load of shame."