She raised her hand to her head. After a long pause: "The frogs!" she muttered, "they croak! I cannot hear."
And then, to my surprise, she turned suddenly on her heel, and walked over the bridge, leaving me there. For a moment I stood aghast, peering after her shadowy figure, and wondering what had taken her. Then, in a minute or less, she came quickly back to me, and I understood. She was crying.
"M. de Barthe," she said, in a trembling voice, which told me that the victory was won. "Is there nothing else? Have you no other penance for me?"
She had drawn the shawl over her head, and I no longer saw her face. "That is all you ask?" she murmured.
"It is granted," she said slowly and firmly. "Forgive me if I seem to speak lightly--if I seem to make little of your generosity or my shame; but I can say no more now. I am so deep in trouble and so gnawed by terror that--I cannot feel anything much to-night, either shame or gratitude. I am in a dream; God grant it may pass as a dream! We are sunk in trouble. But for you and what you have done, M. de Barthe--I--" she paused and I heard her fighting with the sobs which choked her--"forgive me.... I am overwrought. And my--my feet are cold," she added suddenly and irrelevantly. "Will you take me home?"
"Ah, Mademoiselle," I cried remorsefully, "I have been a beast! You are barefoot, and I have kept you here."
"It is nothing," she said in a voice which thrilled me. "My heart is warm, Monsieur--thanks to you. It is many hours since it has been as warm."
She stepped out of the shadow as she spoke--and there, the thing was done. As I had planned, so it had come about. Once more I was crossing the meadow in the dark to be received at Cocheforêt a welcome guest. The frogs croaked in the pool and a bat swooped round us in circles; and surely never--never, I thought, with a kind of exultation in my breast--had man been placed in a stranger position.
Somewhere in the black wood behind us--probably in the outskirts of the village--lurked M. de Cocheforêt. In the great house before us, outlined by a score of lighted windows, were the soldiers come from Auch to take him. Between the two, moving side by side in the darkness, in a silence which each found to be eloquent, were Mademoiselle and I: she who knew so much, I who knew all--all but one little thing!