I suppose love is cruel at heart, cruelly hard against whatever comes between it and the thing it loves. That the priest was nowise to blame Mademoiselle knew as well as I, but she could not give him the comfort of saying so. That is why, I think, love is always feigned to be a child, for in its ignorant singleness of purpose there is nothing so ruthless. It was that same singleness of purpose that frightened me now. Matched against the lad, Gaspard Hellewyl counted for nothing, and never could count, and I dreaded lest, in seeking to hold her back, I should drive her by the nearest and most desperate path. To try a forced authority seemed the safest course; that, and a suggestion that she could help me from above, might keep her out of danger. "You!" said I, with a rough contempt that must have hurt her had her heart not been in the bundle of linen twenty feet down the cliff. "What can you do, cumbered by your skirts as you are? Nothing but add to our trouble. Unless--yes! you may save us both by this, watch here and direct me how to climb." "You!" The contempt was yet rougher than my own, so rough that the hurt she had escaped galled me bitterly. "We have trusted you so far, trusted you in part and because we could not help ourselves, but do you think we shall trust you there?" and with a sudden fierceness she pointed down the ledge. "Day by day you have said to me, Wait! Has your time come now, Monsieur the messenger of Louis of France? Has your time come now, Monsieur, it may be, his catspaw? Was it for this we have waited all these weeks? A touch of the foot by accident--by accident, you understand, one little slip for which no man could openly blame you--and the hope of Navarre would be where your master would have it be. Stand back, Monsieur! Stand back! If you dare to hinder me by so much as a finger, the monk and I, priest and woman though we are, will fling you after the boy." So swift, so unexpected, so bitter was the attack that I had no answer ready, no exculpation, no assurance, no plea, and how the dead-lock would have ended I do not know had Hugues and the big Spaniard 'Tuco not come round the track at a panting trot. The group of but three where four should have been, Brother Paulus on his knees as if in prayer for a passing soul, Mademoiselle's white face blazing with accusation, her arms thrust out in defence or threat, none could say which, my own half-shrinking from the venom of her thought, not only told the truth, but with the truth linked so plausible a lie that I have never blamed them for their thought. I was of France, they of Navarre; and if Mademoiselle, into whose life I had grown daily these weeks past, could think so vilely of me, there was little wonder that their suspicion and ignorant hate out-leaped reality.