"Mademoiselle Fernande," rejoined de Maurel earnestly, "you have, I've no doubt, every excuse for looking upon me as an ill-mannered cur, but none, I think, for imagining that I am an inhuman wretch. Nothing would induce me to leave you here ... in this lonely spot ... alone and in pain...."
"But how am I to get home, dear cousin?" she queried, darting a glance on him from under the fringe of her dark lashes that would have tantalized a saint.
"An you will grant me leave," he said simply, "I will carry you."
"Carry me?" she exclaimed. "Why, it is six kilomètres to the château!"
"If it were twenty I could carry you thither," he interposed with that quaint smile which was wont to lighten his stern face like sunshine on a troubled sea.
Strangely enough and quite unaccountably, Fernande felt a quick blush rising to her cheeks under the look which accompanied that smile.
"Why," he added simply, "you weigh less than a bird."
"Less than one of the pigeons of St. Front, perhaps," she retorted gaily.
"Of course," he said. "I was born at La Frontenay."
"Have you ever heard the pigeons cooing, then?"
"The day," he said, "before an infernal bomb was hurled by an assassin at Napoleon Bonaparte, the idol of France, and his precious life was only saved by a miracle."
Fernande had been leaning with both hands upon de Maurel's arm all this while; but at these words, which he spoke with renewed roughness, she drew back quickly as if she had been stung. Strangely enough, she appeared quite able to stand on her injured foot now, and equally strangely he failed to notice this. For a second or two a look that was nothing short of hate crept into her eyes, and the flush which rose to her cheeks was one of hot anger and of defiance.
He did not flinch under her gaze, even though he would gladly have recalled the foolish speech which had escaped his lips and which obviously had wounded her. Indeed, he could not help but see that the allusion to the aborted conspiracy against the life of Bonaparte planned by the Royalists of Normandy had stung her pride to the quick, and already he was cursing himself for a clumsy lout, and trying to find in his limited vocabulary words wherewith to win her pardon.
But for the space of a few seconds, at any rate, he knew that she stood before him in avowed enmity, and Fernande had to close her eyes lest he should read in them that hatred and contempt which she felt and which she knew that she would always feel for this traitor to his King and to his caste. She had to force herself to remember the rôle which she had set herself to play, to force herself to think of this abominable regicide as a tool for furthering the very cause which he was now helping to crush; and there was a marvellous fund of energy and of enthusiasm lurking in the heart of this child--a marvellous power of duplicity and of self-control, there where her patriotism and her ideals guided her.