ix.

"Just so. I have forty horsemen over the way," was the dry answer.
"For the moment, I am master of the legions, Coadjutor."

"That is true," Madame d'O said; so softly that I started. She had
scarcely spoken since Bezers' entrance. As she spoke now, she shook
back the hood from her face and disclosed the chestnut hair clinging
about her temples--deep blots of colour on the abnormal whiteness of
her skin, "That is true, M. de Bezers," she said. "You have the
legions. You have the power. But you will not use it, I think,
against an old friend. You will not do us this hurt when I--But
listen."

He would not. In the very middle of her appeal he cut her short--brute
that he was! "No Madame!" he burst out violently, disregarding the
beautiful face, the supplicating glance, that might have moved a stone,
"that is just what I will not do. I will not listen! We know one
another. Is not that enough?"

She looked at him fixedly. He returned her gaze, not smiling now, but
eyeing her with a curious watchfulness.

And after a long pause she turned from him. "Very well," she said
softly, and drew a deep, quivering breath, the sound of which reached
us. "Then let us go." And without--strangest thing of all--bestowing
a word or look on her sister, who was weeping bitterly in a chair, she
turned to the door and led the way out, a shrug of her shoulders the
last thing I marked.

The poor lady heard her departing step however, and sprang up. It
dawned upon her that she was being deserted. "Diane! Diane!" she
cried distractedly--and I had to put my hand on Croisette to keep him
quiet, there was such fear and pain in her tone--"I will go! I will
not be left behind in this dreadful place! Do you hear? Come back to
me, Diane!"

It made my blood run wildly. But Diane did not come back. Strange!
And Bezers too was unmoved. He stood between the poor woman and the
door, and by a gesture bid Mirepoix and the priest pass out before him.
"Madame," he said--and his voice, stern and hard as ever, expressed no
jot of compassion for her, rather such an impatient contempt as a
puling child might elicit--"you are safe here. And here you will stop!
Weep if you please," he added cynically, "you will have fewer tears to
shed to-morrow."

His last words--they certainly were odd ones--arrested her attention.
She checked her sobs, being frightened I think, and looked up at him.
Perhaps he had spoken with this in view, fo