“It is the attack upon the Consulates,” said Paul. “It will fail. There are troops enough now to hold it.”
On the other side of the city, however, to the north, it was a different matter. By the Bab-el-Mahroud the French outpost was hard-pressed. Paul was listening with all his intentness.
“It sounds as if our ammunition was running short,” he said, in a low, grave voice; and this time Marguerite was not to be denied. Kneeling up, she caught Paul by the arms as he sat, and turned him toward her. The light, strong and bright, was sweeping across his face in waves.
“Paul, is it true?” she asked, searching his eyes.
Paul Ravenel had no need to ask what was true; he had no heart to deny its truth. The thing which most he dreaded had come to pass. Marguerite knew what he had done. He had been certain that she knew from the moment when she had laid her hand upon his head.
“Yes,” he answered, meeting her gaze. “It is true.”
Paul’s face twitched with a spasm of pain, but he did not take his eyes from Marguerite.
Marguerite shook him gently as one might shake a wayward child.
“Oh, Paul—you can’t have understood what you were doing! You can’t have thought!”
“What do I care about friend’s, Marguerite, when I have you?”
She let go of his arms with such an expression of grief and despair upon her face as cut him to the heart to see. She bowed her forehead upon the palms of her hands and burst into tears. Paul drew her close to him, seeking to comfort her.
“We shall be together, Marguerite, always. Yesterday night, when I foretold you of these massacres—you took it lightly because we were together. You seemed to say nothing in the world mattered so long as we were together.”
“But don’t you see, Paul”—she drew herself away and raised her face, down which tears were running—“we have been both of us alone to-night—already. You here on the roof—I in the court below—and we wanted to be alone, yes, my dear—why deny it, since I know? We wanted to be alone, each of us with our miserable thoughts. . . . In a little while you’ll hate me.”
“No,” he said, violently. “That could never be.”
She bent her head over his hands and pressed them to her eyes, wetting them with her tears.
“Paul,” she whispered between her sobs, “I can’t take such a sacrifice. Oh, my dear, you should have left me with my seven francs and my broken bundle on that balcony in Casablanca.”