Gerard de Montignac had never been so thoroughly startled and surprised in his life. But he was angrily conscious of an emotion far keener than his surprise. He was jealous. Jealousy overmastered the shock of wonder, stabbed him through and left him aching. Marguerite Lambert, the girl of the Villa Iris, so politely difficult! And Paul Ravenel, the man without passion! Why, his brother officers used to laugh at him openly—nay, almost sneered at him and made a butt of him—because of his coldness; and he, indifferent to their laughter, had just laughed back and gone his way. Well, he could afford to, it seemed, since he was here, and for two years had been here, hidden quite away from the world with Marguerite Lambert.
They had stolen a march upon their friends, the pair of them, they had tricked them—yes, that was the exact right word—tricked them, even as they had just tried to trick him, she with her Oriental abandonment to grief—little “animal,” as he had called her in his thoughts—he stretched out on a knob of rock above a precipice in a pose of death! Gerard was in an ugly mood, and he spoke out his thought in a blaze of scorn.
“I asked you the last time I saw you to give me two days of your life, my only two days. I asked no more. Yet you were insulted. You could give two years to another, but two days to me? Oh, dear, no! You wished never to speak to me again.”
“I would give two days to no man,” Marguerite replied, gently, “though I would give my whole life to one man.”
“Even though he deserted?” Gerard asked, with a sneer.
“Paul had not deserted when I gave myself to him,” she answered, quietly. “When he did, it was to save me!”
Gerard did not want to hear anything about that. Some conjecture that the truth of this catastrophe was to be discovered there, had been at the back of his mind ever since he had recognised Marguerite. But he intended not to listen to it, not to let it speak at all. Somehow, her use of Paul’s name angered him extremely. It dropped from her lips with so usual and homely a sound.
“No doubt it was to save you. It would be!” he said, sardonically. “Some decent excuse would be needed even between you two when you sat together alone through the long dark evenings.”