always loved you dearly, my
friend."

She drew him gently toward her, half bending her face under the cold
glance of the young man:

"Look at me closely and see if I lie."

The duke actually endeavored to read the gray-blue eyes of Marianne; but
so strange a flash darted from them, that he recoiled, withdrawing his
hands from the pressure of those fingers.

"Come, come!" she said, "I see that my cat-like eyes still make you
afraid. Are they, then, very dreadful?"

She changed their expression to one of sweetness, humility, timidity and
winsomeness.

"After all, that is something to be proud of, my dear duke. It is very
flattering to make a man tremble who has killed tigers as our sportsmen
kill partridges."

"You know very well why I am still sufficiently a child to tremble
before you, Marianne," murmured Jose. "At my age, it is folly; but I am
as superstitious as gamblers--or sailors, those other gamblers, who
stake their lives, and I have never met you without feeling that I was
about to suffer."

"To suffer from what?"

"To suffer through you," said the duke. "Do you know that if I had
never met you, it is probable that I should never have seen all those
countries of which I spoke just now, and that I should have been married
long ago, at Madrid or at Toledo?"

"And I prevented you?--"

Rosas interrupted Marianne, saying abruptly, and smiling almost sadly:

"Ah! my dear one, if you only knew--you have prevented many things."

"If I have prevented you from being unhappy, I am delighted. Besides, it
is evident that you have never had a very determined inclination for
marriage, seeing that you have preferred to trot around the world."

"Like Don Quixote, eh? Do you know, moreover, since we are talking of
all these things, that you have saved me from dying in the corner like
an abandoned dog?"

"I?" said Marianne.

"You or your songs, as you please. Yes, in Egypt I suffered from fever
something like typhus. They left me for dead, as after a battle, in the
most wretched and frightful of native villages. No doctors, who might,
perhaps, have cured me, not a bed, not even a mattress. My servants,
believing me past hope, abandoned me--or rather, for I prefer your
Parisian word--cast me adrift--there is no other expression. There I
was, stretched out on a heap of damp straw--in short, on a dunghill--"

"You, Rosas?"

"In all conscience, I correctly portrayed Job there; lean, with a three
months' old b