“She must explain it the best way she can,” Camille said, and a gleam of cruelty passed into her blue eyes, which deepened in colour almost to black. “Do you think I should have moved my little finger to help her the day before yesterday, if it had not been necessary to save her to save Jacques? Ah! that Jacques has not even called to inquire after me this morning. He knows, too, that I have not acted for two consecutive evenings. He knows me and that emotion makes me ill. Vincent,” she added, taking my hand in her feverish grasp, “never love. It is such madness to have a heart in this cruel world. From Jacques I have not even had a note, two words upon his card, the little sign of politeness one owes to a suffering friend.” “You are not just,” I told her, “he fears to face you. It is very natural. He is too conscious of his faults, and, you see, he has sent me to find out how you are.” “No,” she said, shaking her head dolefully, “he came to see you, because he needed you for something. Confess to me what it was? From the first I told you that you do not know how to lie or scheme. Oh, God! how nice it would be to love some one like you, not in the way I love you, as a friend, but in the other way! Come, confess that you have a commission from Jacques for me.” “Well, yes,” I replied after a second’s hesitation. There was such uprightness in this strange girl, such a rare nobility of sentiment emanated from her whole being! To finesse with her seemed to me a real shame. I therefore gave her, simply and sadly, Jacques’ message: simply, because I reckoned, and rightly, too, that the surest way to influence her was to state the facts without any phrasing; sadly, because I felt the hardness of this new demand of Molan’s. I also realized its necessity. When I had finished, tears came into her blue eyes.