came to
love me, as you say you did?"

"As I say I did?" I repeated after her. "Do you doubt it? Can you doubt
it in the face of what I have done?"

"Oh, I don't know what to believe!" she cried, a sob in her voice. "You
have deceived me so far, so often. Why did you not tell me that night
on the river? Or later, when I pressed you in this very house? Or again,
the other night in the prison of Toulouse?"

"You ask me why. Can you not answer the question for yourself? Can you
not conceive the fear that was in me that you should shrink away from me
in loathing? The fear that if you cared a little, I might for all time
stifle such affection as you bore me? The fear that I must ruin your
trust in me? Oh, mademoiselle, can you not see how my only hope lay in
first owning defeat to Chatellerault, in first paying the wager?"

"How could you have lent yourself to such a bargain?" was her next
question.

"How, indeed?" I asked in my turn. "From your mother you have heard
something of the reputation that attaches to Bardelys. I was a man of
careless ways, satiated with all the splendours life could give me,
nauseated by all its luxuries. Was it wonderful that I allowed myself
to be lured into this affair? It promised some excitement, a certain
novelty, difficulties in a path that I had--alas!--ever found all
too smooth--for Chatellerault had made your reputed coldness the chief
bolster of his opinion that I should not win.

"Again, I was not given to over-nice scruples. I make no secret of my
infirmities, but do not blame me too much. If you could see the fine
demoiselles we have in Paris, if you could listen to their tenets and
take a deep look into their lives, you would not marvel at me. I had
never known any but these. On the night of my coming to Lavedan, your
sweetness, your pure innocence, your almost childish virtue, dazed me by
their novelty. From that first moment I became your slave. Then I was in
your garden day by day. And here, in this old Languedoc garden with you
and your roses, during the languorous days of my convalescence, is it
wonderful that some of the purity, some of the sweetness that was of
you and of your roses, should have crept into my heart and cleansed it
a little? Ah, mademoiselle!" I cried--and, coming close to her, I would
have bent my knee in intercession but that she restrained me.

"Monsieur," she interrupted, "we harass ourselves in vain. This can have
but one ending."

Her tones we