Nay! in this at least there was no dream! no coldness in his voice when he repeated those words with such a sigh of tenderness, such a world of longing, that the bitterness of her great pain vanished, giving place to tears. He took her hand in his. The passion was momentarily conquered, forced within his innermost soul, by his own alter ego, that second personality in him, the cold-blooded and coolly-calculating adventurer who juggled with his life and tossed it recklessly upon the sea of chance 'twixt a doggerel and a smile. But the tender love lingered on, fighting the enemy a while longer, the wistful desire was there for her kiss, the tired longing for the exquisite repose of her embrace.
He took her hand in his, and bent his lips to it, and with the warmth of his kiss upon it, she felt a moisture like a tear.
"I must go, dear," he said, after a little while.
"Why? Why?" she repeated obstinately. "Am I nothing then? Is my life of no account? My sorrows? My fears? My misery? Oh!" she added with vehement bitterness, "why should it always be others? What are others to you and to me, Percy? ... Are we not happy here? ... Have you not fulfilled to its uttermost that self-imposed duty to people who can be nothing to us? ... Is not your life ten thousand times more precious to me than the lives of ten thousand others?"
Even through the darkness, and because his face was so close to hers, she could see a quaint little smile playing round the corners of his mouth.
"Nay, m'dear," he said gently, "'tis not ten thousand lives that call to me to-day ... only one at best. ... Don't you hate to think of that poor little old cure sitting in the midst of his ruined pride and hopes: the jewels so confidently entrusted to his care, stolen from him, he waiting, perhaps, in his little presbytery for the day when those brutes will march him to prison and to death. ... Nay! I think a little sea voyage and English country air would suit the Abbe Foucquet, m'dear, and I only mean to ask him to cross the Channel with me! ..."
"Percy!" she pleaded.
"Oh! I know! I know!" he rejoined with that short deprecatory sigh of his, which seemed always to close any discussion between them on that point, "you are thinking of that absurd duel ..." He laughed lightly, good-humouredly, and his eyes gleamed with merriment.
"La, m'dear!" he said gaily, "will you not reflect a moment? Could I refuse the challenge before His Royal Highness and the ladies? I couldn't.
... Faith! that was it. ... Just a case of couldn't. ... Fate did it all ... the quarrel ... my interference ... the challenge. ... HE had planned it all of course. ... Let us own that he is a brave man, seeing that he and I are not even yet, for that beating he gave me on the Calais cliffs."
"Yes! he has planned it all," she retorted vehemently. "The quarrel to-night, your journey to France, your meeting with him face to face at a given hour and place where he can most readily, most easily close the death-trap upon you."
This time he broke into a laugh. A good, hearty laugh, full of the joy of living, of the madness and intoxication of a bold adventure, a laugh that had not one particle of anxiety or of tremor in it.
