ou shall have the walls
for audience." And she moved towards the door, but I barred her passage.
I was courteous to the last degree; I bowed low before her as I put
myself in her way.

"It is all that was wanting--that you should offer me violence!" she
exclaimed.

"God forbid!" said I.

"Then let me pass."

"Aye, when you have heard me."

"I do not wish to hear you. Nothing that you may say can matter to me.
Oh, monsieur, if you have any instincts of gentility, if you have any
pretension to be accounted anything but a mauvais sujet, I beg of you to
respect my grief. You witnessed, yourself, the arrest of my father. This
is no season for such as scene as you are creating."

"Pardon! It is in such a season as this that you need the comfort and
support that the man you love alone can give you."

"The man I love?" she echoed, and from flushed that they had been, her
cheeks went very pale. Her eyes fell for an instant, then--they were
raised again, and their blue depths were offered me. "I think, sir," she
said, through her teeth, "that your insolence transcends all belief."

"Can you deny it?" I cried. "Can you deny that you love me? If you
can--why, then, you lied to me three nights ago at Toulouse!"

That smote her hard--so hard that she forgot her assurance that she
would not listen to me--her promise to herself that she would stoop to
no contention with me.

"If, in a momentary weakness, in my nescience of you as you truly are,
I did make some such admission, I did entertain such feelings for
you, things have come to my knowledge since then, monsieur, that have
revealed you to me as another man; I have learnt something that has
utterly withered such love as I then confessed. Now, monsieur, are you
satisfied, and will you let me pass?" She said the last words with a
return of her imperiousness, already angry at having been drawn so far.

"I am satisfied, mademoiselle," I answered brutally, "that you did not
speak the truth three nights ago. You never loved me. It was pity that
deluded you, shame that urged you--shame at the Delilah part you had
played and at your betrayal of me. Now, mademoiselle, you may pass,"
said I.

And I stood aside, assured that as she was a woman she would not pass
me now. Nor did she. She recoiled a step instead. Her lip quivered. Then
she recovered quickly. Her mother might have told her that she was a
fool for engaging herself in such a duel with me--me, the veteran of
a hundr