y these things; by your insistence you
compel me to be harsh. We will end this matter here and now, Monsieur,
and I will ask you to understand that I never wish it reopened, else
shall I be forced to seek protection at the hands of my father or my
brother."

"You may seek it now, Suzanne," quoth a voice from the thicket at her
back, a voice which came to startle both of them though in different
ways. Before they had recovered from their surprise the Marquis de
Bellecour stood before them. He was a tall man of some fifty years of
age, but so powerful of frame and so scrupulous in dress that he might
have conveyed an impression of more youth. His face, though handsome
in a high-bred way, was puffed and of an unhealthy yellow. But the eyes
were as keen as the mouth was voluptuous, and in his carefully dressed
black hair there were few strands of grey.

He came slowly forward, and his lowering glance wandered from his
daughter to his secretary in inquiry. At last--

"Well?" he demanded. "What is the matter?"

"It is nothing, Monsieur," his daughter answered him. "A trifling affair
'twixt M. la Boulaye and me, with which I will not trouble you."

"It is not nothing, my lord," cried La Boulaye, his voice vibrating
oddly. "It is that I love your daughter and that I have told her of it."
He was in a very daring mood that morning.

The Marquis glanced at him in dull amazement. Then a flush crept into
his sallow cheeks and mounted to his brow. An inarticulate grunt came
from his thick lips.

"Canaille!" he exclaimed, through set teeth. "Can you have presumed so
far?"

He carried a riding-switch, and he seemed to grasp it now in a manner
peculiarly menacing. But La Boulaye was nothing daunted. Lost he already
accounted himself, and on the strength of the logic that if a man must
hang, a sheep as well as a lamb may be the cause of it, he took what
chances the time afforded him to pile up his debt.

"There is neither insolence nor presumption in what I have done," he
answered, giving back the Marquis look for look and scowl for scowl.
"You deem it so because I am the secretary to the Marquis de Bellecour
and she is the daughter of that same Marquis. But these are no more than
the fortuitous circumstances in which we chance to find ourselves. That
she is a woman must take rank before the fact that she is your daughter,
and that I am a man must take rank before the fact that I am your
secretary. Not, then, as your secretary