port which
you played so successfully last year? Do you wish to see me once more
a love-sick suppliant at your feet, so that you might again have the
pleasure of kicking me aside, like a troublesome lap-dog?"

She had succeeded in rousing him for the moment: and again she looked
straight at him, for it was thus she remembered him a year ago.

"Percy! I entreat you!" she whispered, "can we not bury the past?"

"Pardon me, Madame, but I understood you to say that your desire was to
dwell in it."

"Nay! I spoke not of THAT past, Percy!" she said, while a tone of
tenderness crept into her voice. "Rather did I speak of a time when you
loved me still! and I . . . oh! I was vain and frivolous; your wealth and
position allured me: I married you, hoping in my heart that your great
love for me would beget in me a love for you . . . but, alas! . . ."

The moon had sunk low down behind a bank of clouds. In the east a soft
grey light was beginning to chase away the heavy mantle of the night.
He could only see her graceful outline now, the small queenly head, with
its wealth of reddish golden curls, and the glittering gems forming the
small, star-shaped, red flower which she wore as a diadem in her hair.

"Twenty-four hours after our marriage, Madame, the Marquis de St. Cyr
and all his family perished on the guillotine, and the popular rumour
reached me that it was the wife of Sir Percy Blakeney who helped to send
them there."

"Nay! I myself told you the truth of that odious tale."

"Not till after it had been recounted to me by strangers, with all its
horrible details."

"And you believed them then and there," she said with great vehemence,
"without a proof or question--you believed that I, whom you vowed you
loved more than life, whom you professed you worshipped, that _I_ could
do a thing so base as these STRANGERS chose to recount. You thought I
meant to deceive you about it all--that I ought to have spoken before I
married you: yet, had you listened, I would have told you that up to the
very morning on which St. Cyr went to the guillotine, I was straining
every nerve, using every influence I possessed, to save him and his
family. But my pride sealed my lips, when your love seemed to perish,
as if under the knife of that same guillotine. Yet I would have told you
how I was duped! Aye! I, whom that same popular rumour had endowed with
the sharpest wits in France! I was tricked into doing this thing, by men
who knew how