"Hang the child! Why did you bring him along? You are no child. You can understand me. You are a woman, full of intelligence and goodness and beauty. They don't know you here, they think you a little demoiselle in pinafores. Before Heaven, mademoiselle, there is that about you,--I see it, I feel it here at your side, in this rustling darkness--there is that about you that a man would gladly die for." Mlle. de Bergerac interrupted him with energy. "You talk extravagantly. I don't understand you; you frighten me." "I talk as I feel. I frighten you? So much the better. I wish to stir your heart and get some answer to the passion of my own." Mlle. de Bergerac was silent a moment, as if collecting her thoughts. "If I talk with you on this subject, I must do it with my wits about me," she said at last. "I must know exactly what we each mean." "It's plain then that I can't hope to inspire you with any degree of affection." "One doesn't promise to love, Vicomte; I can only answer for the present. My heart is so full of good wishes toward you that it costs me comparatively little to say I don't love you." "And anything I may say of my own feelings will make no difference to you?" "You have said you love me. Let it rest there." "But you look as if you doubted my word." "You can't see how I look; Vicomte, I believe you." "Well then, there is one point gained. Let us pass to the others. I'm thirty years old. I have a very good name and a very bad reputation. I honestly believe that, though I've fallen below my birth, I've kept above my fame. I believe that I have no vices of temper; I'm neither brutal, nor jealous, nor miserly. As for my fortune, I'm obliged to admit that it consists chiefly in my expectations. My actual property is about equal to your brother's and you know how your sister-in-law is obliged to live. My expectations are thought particularly good. My great-uncle, M. de Sorbières, possesses, chiefly in landed estates, a fortune of some three millions of livres. I have no important competitors, either in blood or devotion. He is eighty-seven years old and paralytic, and within the past year I have been laying siege to his favor with such constancy that his surrender, like his extinction, is only a question of time. I received yesterday a summons to go with him to the Pyrenees, to drink certain medicinal waters. The least he can do, on my return, is to make me a handsome allowance, which with my own revenues will make--_en attendant_ better things--a sufficient income for a reasonable couple." There was a pause of some moments, during which we slowly walked along in the obstructed starlight, the silence broken only by the train of my aunt's dress brushing against the twigs and pebbles. "What a pity," she said, at last, "that you are not able to speak of all this good fortune as in the present rather than in the future."