"It is the truth, Fernande," he rejoined calmly. "Ah! you may scorn me, your beautiful eyes may flash hatred upon me. No doubt that I deserve both your scorn and your hate. I am rough, uneducated, illiterate, common, vulgar--what you will; but I am a man, a creature of flesh and blood, with a mind and a soul and a heart. That soul and that heart are yours--yours because you filched them from me with your blue eyes and your enchanting smile. You may turn away from me now--and we may part to-day never perhaps to meet again! We may each go our ways--you to sacrifice your youth, your beauty, your life to a degenerate cause; I, to eat my heart out in mad longing for you; but what has passed between us will never be forgotten. My words will ring in your ears long after an assassin's hand, which your kinsfolk have armed against me, has done its work and sent me to fall obscurely in a ditch with a Royalist bullet between my shoulders...." Her hands dropped away from her face. She drew herself up and looked at him with large, puzzled, inquiring eyes. "What do you mean?" she asked slowly. With a careless laugh and a shrug of the shoulders, he pointed to the thicket immediately behind her. "I mean that day after day an assassin lurks in the undergrowth, dogging my footsteps, watching his opportunity. I mean that three times in the past week I have caught a man in there with a musket in his hand--a musket which was aimed at me. Three times I dragged a man out into the light of day, and the terror of being handed to the hangman forced an avowal from his lips. An avowal! always the same! He had been paid by an agent of Joseph de Puisaye to put a bullet into my back." "It is false!" she cried. "It is true!" he retorted. "Why should the hands that pillaged the home of M. de Ris, that murdered the Bishop of Quimper and outraged the Bishop of Cannes--why should they hesitate to strike a de Maurel who happens to be an inconvenient foe?" "It is false!" she reiterated vehemently. "False, think you? Then I pray you listen." He put up his hand, and instinctively she obeyed. The wood lay quite still under the heat of this July forenoon. There was not a rustle among the trees; the birds were silent, and from the mysterious pool there only came the gentle lapping of lazy waters against the mossy bank. Fernande strained her ears to listen, and soon she heard a stealthy, furtive movement in the undergrowth close by, and she was conscious of that curious, unerring sense which in the midst of Nature's silence proclaims the presence of a hidden human being. She felt more than she heard that somewhere amidst the tangled chestnut a creature was lurking, who was neither bird nor beast--a creature who might, indeed, be hiding there with sinister intent, his hand upon a musket which he had been paid to wield.