“I wonder!” said Renouard, raising his eyes and noting the crimson of her ear-lobes against the live whiteness of her complexion, the sombre, as if secret, night-splendour of her eyes under the writhing flames of her hair. “Some woman who wouldn’t believe in that poor innocence of his. . . Yes. You probably. And now you will not believe in me—not even in me who must in truth be what I am—even to death. No! You won’t. And yet, Felicia, a woman like you and a man like me do not often come together on this earth.” The flame of her glorious head scorched his face. He flung his hat far away, and his suddenly lowered eyelids brought out startlingly his resemblance to antique bronze, the profile of Pallas, still, austere, bowed a little in the shadow of the rock. “Oh! If you could only understand the truth that is in me!” he added. She waited, as if too astounded to speak, till he looked up again, and then with unnatural force as if defending herself from some unspoken aspersion, “It’s I who stand for truth here! Believe in you! In you, who by a heartless falsehood—and nothing else, nothing else, do you hear?—have brought me here, deceived, cheated, as in some abominable farce!” She sat down on a boulder, rested her chin in her hands, in the pose of simple grief—mourning for herself. “It only wanted this. Why! Oh! Why is it that ugliness, ridicule, and baseness must fall across my path.” On that height, alone with the sky, they spoke to each other as if the earth had fallen away from under their feet. “Are you grieving for your dignity? He was a mediocre soul and could have given you but an unworthy existence.” She did not even smile at those words, but, superb, as if lifting a corner of the veil, she turned on him slowly. “And do you imagine I would have devoted myself to him for such a purpose! Don’t you know that reparation was due to him from me? A sacred debt—a fine duty. To redeem him would not have been in my power—I know it. But he was blameless, and it was for me to come forward. Don’t you see that in the eyes of the world nothing could have rehabilitated him so completely as his marriage with me? No word of evil could be whispered of him after I had given him my hand. As to giving myself up to anything less than the shaping of a man’s destiny—if I thought I could do it I would abhor myself. . . .” She spoke with authority in her deep fascinating, unemotional voice. Renouard meditated, gloomy, as if over some sinister riddle of a beautiful sphinx met on the wild road of his life. “Yes. Your father was right. You are one of these aristocrats . . .” She drew herself up haughtily. “What do you say? My father! . . . I an aristocrat.”