"Then I cannot answer your question either," retorted she. La Vireville made her a bow. "So be it. I shall always cherish the hope that you meant to make a good job of it, like Mlle. de Corday with the late Citizen Marat. Your opportunity, par exemple, was something better. And you, Madame, if it gives you any pleasure, need not know whether I was not awake and watching you all the time." He smiled mischievously. "But let me proceed to the second reason why I am not so magnanimous--what a mouthful of a word it is!--as you think. It is this--that the advent of the patriots of Porhoët followed so soon on your threatening departure that I felt tolerably sure you had not had time, even if you had the will, to summon them. And I remembered that you had warned me of certain suspicious spirits." This time Mme. de Guéfontaine confessed to emotion, drawing a great breath of relief. "M. le Chevalier, you believe me then--that I did not send for them, that I never should have done!" "Madame, naturally I believe you. Have you not already told me so? Yet consider--you told me here, after it was all over, while my point is, that the idea had already occurred to me at the time, and that when I had the honour of carrying you off I was pretty sure that you had not, in the event, betrayed me." She winced at the word, and dropped her head. "I do not know how I could even have threatened it," she said earnestly. "But I was mad." "You cannot think, Madame," went on La Vireville, the mischief gone out of his face, "how much that thought comforted me. It was difficult for me to connect the idea of you and . . . treachery. The knife--well and good, I could understand that, but not the other." Mme. de Guéfontaine lifted her head and met his eyes. "The difficulty is," she said quietly, "to be sure that I have convinced you that I did not betray you even in intention; that when they rushed in, my idea of vengeance was already dead." "I am content to take your word for that, Madame," said La Vireville, and, bending forward, he lightly took one of her hands and lifted it to his lips. She flushed and sighed. "It is no use for you to deny it, M. le Chevalier. You are what you refuse to be called." At that moment Grain d'Orge stumbled past, bearing an armful of herbage for the horse, and casting at the pair as he went, out of his quick little eyes, a glance at once solicitous and discontented. Mme. de Guéfontaine seemed fully conscious of it. "Poor Grain d'Orge," she said musingly, as soon as he was out of hearing. "He was half beside himself with anxiety about you. I do not know to what saints he did not pray. I am sure he will never be able to pay for all the candles he has promised to St. Yves alone. How was it, Monsieur Augustin, you who repudiate . . . that word . . . that you had never given him even an inkling that I was responsible (as you had every reason to think) for the appearance of the National Guard?"