"What things? I have read nothing," said Giselle, harshly. "I only know that a man who was neither your husband nor your brother, and who consequently was under no obligation to defend you, has been foolish enough to be nearly killed for your sake. Is not that a proof of your downfall? Don't you know it?" "Downfall?" repeated Jacqueline, as if she did not understand her. Then, seizing her friend's hand, she forcibly raised it to her lips: "Ah! what can anything matter to me," she cried, "if only you remain my friend; and he has never doubted me!" "Women like you can always find defenders," said Giselle, tearing her hand from her cousin's grasp. Giselle was not herself at that moment. "But, for your own sake, it would have been better he should have abstained from such an act of Quixotism." "Giselle! can it be that you think me guilty?" "Guilty!" cried Madame de Talbrun, her pale face aflame. "A little more and Monsieur de Cymier's sword-point would have pierced his lungs." "Good heavens!" cried Jacqueline, hiding her face in her hands. "But I have done nothing to--" "Nothing except to set two men against each other; to make them suffer, or to make fools of them, and to be loved by them all the same." "I have not been a coquette," said Jacqueline, with indignation. "You must have been, to authorize the boasts of Monsieur de Cymier. He had seen Fred so seldom, and Tonquin had so changed him that he spoke in his presence--without supposing any one would interfere. I dare not tell you what he said--" "Whatever spite or revenge suggested to him, no doubt," said Jacqueline. "Listen, Giselle--Oh, you must listen. I shall not be long." She forced her to sit down; she crouched on a foot stool at her feet, holding her hands in hers so tightly that Giselle could not draw them away, and began her story, with all its details, of what had happened to her since she left Fresne. She told of her meeting with Wanda; of the fatal evening which had resulted in her expulsion from the convent; her disgust at the Sparks family; the snare prepared for her by Madame Strahlberg. "And I can not tell you all," she added, "I can not tell you what drove me away from my true friends, and threw me among these people--" Giselle's sad smile seemed to answer, "No need--I am aware of it--I know my husband." Encouraged by this, Jacqueline went on with her confession, hiding nothing that was wrong, showing herself just as she had been, a poor, proud child who had set out to battle for herself in a dangerous world. At every step she had been more and more conscious of her own imprudence, of her own weakness, and of an ever-increasing desire to be done with independence; to submit to law, to be subject to any rules which would deliver her from the necessity of obeying no will but her own.