A step, a heavy, hasty step, broke into her reverie—a step that had not been her way of late. It could only be one person’s. She turned, and saw M. Georges Camain advancing along the line of pillars towards her, wearing a face of thunder.
Valentine’s heart sank. She went a few paces to meet him, and he stayed his advance, and, beckoning to her in a manner quite devoid of his usual objectionable gallantry, walked back to the great hearth and took up by his stand by it. Evidently he felt the middle of so vast an apartment no place for a scene, and that there was going to be a scene was written on his whole demeanour.
“Well, Madame Vidal?” He threw the words at her like a challenge.
She met his look with composure, and answered, “Yes, Citizen Deputy.”
“Yes, Citizen Deputy,” he mimicked her angrily. “The Citizen Deputy wants to know what you have done with the gardener who was working here a few days ago?”
“I have done nothing with him, Citizen. He has not been here for the last three days.”
“A messenger came to say that his mother in Paris was dying.”
“_Mother!_” said Camain, exploding. “Mother dying! You have the impudence . . . Shall I tell you, since you are so persistently innocent, why he left? His plans in Paris were threatened, and you know what those plans were, and his work here, too, as well as I—no, by God, better, since I have not yet had time to investigate his operations at Mirabel.”
“Plans? Work?” repeated Valentine. “Do you refer to the Italian——”
“Pshaw!” broke in the ex-Jacobin savagely, “don’t trifle with me like that, woman! I say you know what he came to do, and you helped him to do it, and to get away with his booty.”
Then he had got away . . . or did Camain only mean from Mirabel? Valentine made no reply.
“Why don’t you answer me?” barked her late admirer.
“You are so positive, Citizen Deputy, what is the use? It is of little avail for me to protest—though you must know it quite well—that I had no hand in the appointment of this gardener who seems to have displeased you, nor in the carrying out of his ‘work,’ whatever it may have been, except that I used to give him a cup of coffee with his meal at mid-day.”
“Yes, just as out of the same pure kindness you opened the door in the park wall to let one or the other of the rest out or in—just as you fooled me into saving you from being confronted with the man who broke into the sallette, your accomplice, whom you invited here, I expect——”