ar," said she, "that you are not Rene de Lesperon? That
Mademoiselle de Marsac is not your betrothed?"

"Yes--by my every hope of Heaven!" I cried passionately.

She continued to survey me with that quiet smile of mocking scorn.

"I have heard it said," quoth she, "that the greatest liars are ever
those that are readiest to take oath." Then, with a sudden gasp of
loathing, "I think you have dropped something, monsieur," said she,
pointing to the ground. And without waiting for more, she swung round
and left me.

Face upwards at my feet lay the miniature that poor Lesperon had
entrusted to me in his dying moments. It had dropped from my doublet in
the struggle, and I never doubted now but that the picture it contained
was that of Mademoiselle de Marsac.

CHAPTER IX. A NIGHT ALARM

I was returning that same afternoon from a long walk that I had
taken--for my mood was of that unenviable sort that impels a man to be
moving--when I found a travelling-chaise drawn up in the quadrangle as
if ready for a journey. As I mounted the steps of the chateau I came
face to face with mademoiselle, descending. I drew aside that she might
pass; and this she did with her chin in the air, and her petticoat drawn
to her that it might not touch me.

I would have spoken to her, but her eyes looked straight before her with
a glance that was too forbidding; besides which there was the gaze of a
half-dozen grooms upon us. So, bowing before her--the plume of my doffed
hat sweeping the ground--I let her go. Yet I remained standing where
she had passed me, and watched her enter the coach. I looked after the
vehicle as it wheeled round and rattled out over the drawbridge, to
raise a cloud of dust on the white, dry road beyond.

In that hour I experienced a sense of desolation and a pain to which I
find it difficult to give expression. It seemed to me as if she had gone
out of my life for all time--as if no reparation that I could ever make
would suffice to win her back after what had passed between us that
morning. Already wounded in her pride by what Mademoiselle de Marsac had
told her of our relations, my behaviour in the rose garden had completed
the work of turning into hatred the tender feelings that but yesterday
she had all but confessed for me. That she hated me now, I was well
assured. My reflections as I walked had borne it in upon me how rash,
how mad had been my desperate action, and with bitterness I realized
that I had