he
glasses clinked fitfully against the plates as she handled them; the
knives jarred with one another. And I stood by, trembling myself; and
endured this strange kind of penance.

She signed to me at last to sit down; and she went herself, and stood in
the garden doorway with her back to me. I obeyed. I sat down. But though
I had eaten nothing since the afternoon of the day before, I could not
swallow. I fumbled with my knife, and drank; and grew hot and angry at
this farce; and then looked through the window at the dripping bushes,
and the rain and the distant sundial--and grew cold again.

Suddenly she turned round and came to my side. 'You do not eat,' she
said.

I threw down my knife, and sprang up in a frenzy of passion. 'MON DIEU!
Madame,' I cried, 'do you think that I have NO heart?'

And then in a moment I knew what I had done, what a folly I had
committed. For in a moment she was on her knees on the floor, clasping
my knees, pressing her wet cheeks to my rough clothes, crying to me for
mercy--for life! life! his life! Oh, it was horrible! It was horrible to
hear her gasping voice, to see her fair hair falling over my mud-stained
boots, to mark her slender little form convulsed with sobs, to feel that
it was a woman, a gentlewoman, who thus abased herself at my feet!

'Oh, Madame! Madame!' I cried in my pain, 'I beg you to rise. Rise, or I
must go!'

'His life! only his life!' she moaned passionately. 'What had he done
to you--that you should hunt him down? what have we done to you that you
should slay us? Oh! have mercy! Have mercy! Let him go, and we will pray
for you, I and my sister will pray for you, every morning and night of
our lives.'

I was in terror lest someone should come and see her lying there, and I
stooped and tried to raise her. But she only sank the lower, until her
tender little hands touched the rowels of my spurs. I dared not move, At
last I took a sudden resolution.

'Listen, then, Madame!' I said almost sternly, 'if you will not rise.
You forget everything, both how I stand, and how small my power is! You
forget that if I were to release your husband to-day he would be seized
within the hour by those who are still in the village and who are
watching every road--who have not ceased to suspect my movements and my
intentions. You forget, I say my circumstances--'

She cut me short on that word. She sprang to her feet and faced me. One
moment more and I should have said something