"For the dying in this world I can answer," said she; "Louis will see to that. As to the hereafter, Christ who died upon the Cross is above the cross. The keeping of such an oath is the sacrilege, not the breaking. Promise me, Monsieur; not to Plessis? Think what we owe you--Navarre, Narbonne, Morsigny, I myself. Oh, Monsieur, Monsieur! do not put your blood upon our heads for such a blind oath as that. Promise me, promise me." But again I shook my head. This was the bitterest moment of all that bitter humiliation, and yet, knowing that it was not altogether my oath that drew me, I could not leave her to sorrow over a seeming useless sacrifice. "There is another reason, Mademoiselle; the King holds a hostage for my return." "Oh!" said she blankly, the fire dying from her eyes; "a hostage? Who is he?" "It is a woman, Mademoiselle." "Oh!" said she again, but this time with a subtle sharpening of the emphasis; "a woman? As I said at the first, tell me no more than you wish to tell." "Then you trust me, Mademoiselle?" I asked, but doubtfully, for if her mouth said, Tell nothing, her eyes said, I, too, am a woman; tell all. "Why not?" she answered, her voice prim and hard, until her eyes, which had been looking proudly into mine, fell, I don't know why, and rested on the cord, then it grew gentle again. "Say nothing, or--everything." "Everything, then. She is a peasant of Flanders, a herdsman's daughter. The story is common enough----" "Too common, Monsieur," she broke in, her eyes blazing, her hands clenched in her lap as again she shrank back as far as the hollows of the chair would let her. "Oh, you honourable gentlemen! Do you think that because I am Suzanne de Narbonne and she a peasant I care nothing for her womanhood? Shame, Monsieur Hellewyl, shame; she is my sister." "I thought you trusted me, Mademoiselle?" I retorted, not sorry she had put herself in the wrong. "I said so, Monsieur, but this common story of yours----" "Is it not common that a man should think himself in love with the one pretty face he has ever seen in his life? that he should dress her coarse mind with the graces he knew later had never touched her, no, not for an hour? that he should hold her sacred for her very womanhood, and worship as God's fine gold what, when his knowledge wakened, he knew to be at its best but honest potters' clay? Is it----" "Yes, Monsieur," she interrupted softly, and stretching her open hand across the angle of the table, "that last at least is so uncommon from a Seigneur of where you will to a peasant born in his woods, that I may be forgiven if for a minute I doubted. Am I forgiven, Monsieur Gaspard?" It was a return of the old Suzanne D'Orfeuil, and resting her hand on mine, I kissed it as I might have kissed a Queen's, or no, not quite: if the kiss was reverent and carefully passionless, the touch of the lips lingered a moment or two beyond the nice allotment of ceremony.