"You! You, the Judas who
has sold my father to the Cardinal for a paltry share in our estates. And
I believed that mask of yours to hide the face of St. Auban!"
Her words froze me into a stony mass of insensibility. There was no logic
in my attitude; I see it now. Appearances were all against me, and her
belief no more than justified. I overlooked all this, and instead of
saving time by recounting how I came to be there and thus delivering her
from the anguish that was torturing her, I stood, dumb and cruel, cut to
the quick by her scorn and her suspicions that I was capable of such a
thing as she imputed, and listening to the dictates of an empty pride that
prompted me to make her pay full penalty.
"Oh, God pity me!" she wailed. "Have you naught to say?"
Still I maintained my mad, resentful silence. And presently, as one who
muses--
"You!" she said again. "You, whom I--" She stopped short. "Oh! The
shame of it!" she moaned.
Reason at last came uppermost, and as in my mind I completed her broken
sentence, my heart gave a great throb and I was thawed to a gentler
purpose.
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