One evening--I had been ten days at the chateau--we went a half-league or so up the Garonne in a boat, she and I. As we were returning, drifting with the stream, the oars idle in my hand, I spoke of leaving Lavedan.
She looked up quickly; her expression was almost of alarm, and her eyes dilated as they met mine--for, as I have said, she was all unversed in the ways of her sex, and by nature too guileless to attempt to disguise her feelings or dissemble them.
“But why must you go so soon?” she asked. “You are safe at Lavedan, and abroad you may be in danger. It was but two days ago that they took a poor young gentleman of these parts at Pau; so that you see the persecution is not yet ended. Are you”--and her voice trembled ever so slightly--“are you weary of us, monsieur?”
I shook my head at that, and smiled wistfully.
“Weary?” I echoed. “Surely, mademoiselle, you do not think it? Surely your heart must tell you something very different?”
She dropped her eyes before the passion of my gaze. And when presently she answered me, there was no guile in her words; there were the dictates of the intuitions of her sex, and nothing more.
“But it is possible, monsieur. You are accustomed to the great world--”
“The great world of Lesperon, in Gascony?” I interrupted.
“No, no; the great world you have inhabited at Paris and elsewhere. I can understand that at Lavedan you should find little of interest, and--and that your inactivity should render you impatient to be gone.”
“If there were so little to interest me then it might be as you say. But, oh, mademoiselle--” I ceased abruptly. Fool! I had almost fallen a prey to the seductions that the time afforded me. The balmy, languorous eventide, the broad, smooth river down which we glided, the foliage, the shadows on the water, her presence, and our isolation amid such surroundings, had almost blotted out the matter of the wager and of my duplicity.
She laughed a little nervous laugh, and--maybe to ease the tension that my sudden silence had begotten--“You see,” she said, “how your imagination deserts you when you seek to draw upon it for proof of what you protest. You were about to tell me of--of the interests that hold you at Lavedan, and when you come to ponder them, you find that you can think of nothing. Is it--is it not so?” She put the question very timidly, as if half afraid of the answer she might provoke.