She tried. But the movement wrung a cry of pain from her lips. She fell back against the broad shoulder which was so conveniently held for her support and leaned her head against it. She closed her eyes as if ready to swoon. De Maurel was ready to anathematize Heaven for perpetrating such wanton cruelty against a being so perfect and so frail. A pair of blue eyes that were swimming in tears were turned dolefully up to him. "I fear me that I shall have to remain breakfastless, after all," murmured Fernande, with lips that quivered like those of a child about to cry. "I pray you leave me, dear cousin. You cannot afford to waste your time over the ailments of an insignificant person like me. Perhaps you may find some one in the village good enough to take a message over to my father by and by, asking him to send Pere Lebrun's carriole hither. But oh! I pray you haste! I shall be so desperately hungry ere the carriole come." "Mademoiselle Fernande," rejoined de Maurel earnestly, "you have, I've no doubt, every excuse for looking upon me as an ill-mannered cur, but none, I think, for imagining that I am an inhuman wretch. Nothing would induce me to leave you here ... in this lonely spot ... alone and in pain...." "But how am I to get home, dear cousin?" she queried, darting a glance on him from under the fringe of her dark lashes that would have tantalized a saint. "An you will grant me leave," he said simply, "I will carry you." "Carry me?" she exclaimed. "Why, it is six kilometres to the chateau!" "If it were twenty I could carry you thither," he interposed with that quaint smile which was wont to lighten his stern face like sunshine on a troubled sea. Strangely enough and quite unaccountably, Fernande felt a quick blush rising to her cheeks under the look which accompanied that smile. "Why," he added simply, "you weigh less than a bird." "Less than one of the pigeons of St. Front, perhaps," she retorted gaily. "They were of stone," quoth he dryly. "Ah! you know the legend, too?" "Of course," he said. "I was born at La Frontenay." "Have you ever heard the pigeons cooing, then?" "Yes," he replied curtly. "Once." "When was that?" "The day," he said, "before an infernal bomb was hurled by an assassin at Napoleon Bonaparte, the idol of France, and his precious life was only saved by a miracle." Fernande had been leaning with both hands upon de Maurel's arm all this while; but at these words, which he spoke with renewed roughness, she drew back quickly as if she had been stung. Strangely enough, she appeared quite able to stand on her injured foot now, and equally strangely he failed to notice this. For a second or two a look that was nothing short of hate crept into her eyes, and the flush which rose to her cheeks was one of hot anger and of defiance.