The Trampling of the Lilies | Page 6

seemed symbolical. For a moment he had cast aside his creed to woo a woman, and now that she had denied him he returned to Rousseau, and gathered up the tome almost in penitence at his momentary defection.
"I am quite myself, Mademoiselle," he answered quietly. His cheeks were flushed, but beyond that, his excitement seemed to have withered. "It is you who yesternight, for one brief moment and again to-day - were not yourself, and to that you owe it that I have spoken to you as I have done."
Between these two it would seem as the humour of the one waned, that of the other waxed. Her glance kindled anew at his last words.
"I?" she echoed. "I was not myself? What are you saying, Monsieur the Secretary?"
" Last night, and again just now, you were so kind, you - you smiled so sweetly - "
"Mon Dieu!" she exclaimed, angrily interrupting him. "See what you are for all your high-sounding vaunts of yourself and your attributes! A woman may not smile upon you, may not say one kind word to you, but you must imagine you have made a conquest. Ma foi, you and yours do not deserve to be treated as anything but vassals. When we show you a kindness, see how you abuse it. We extend to you our little finger and you instantly lay claim to the whole arm. Because last night I permitted myself to exchange a jest with you, because I chance to be kind to you again to-day, you repay me with insults!"
"Stop!" he cried, rousing himself once more. "That is too much to say, Mademoiselle. To tell a woman that you love her is never to insult her. To be loved is never to be slighted. Upon the meanest of His creatures it is enjoined to love the same God whom the King loves, and there is no insult to God in professing love for Him. Would you make a woman more than that?"
"Monsieur, you put questions I have no mind to answer; you suggest a discussion I have no inclination to pursue. For you and me let it suffice that I account myself affronted by your words, your tone, and your manner. You drive me to say these things; by your insistence you compel me to be harsh. We will end this matter here and now, Monsieur, and I will ask you to understand that I never wish it reopened, else shall I be forced to seek protection at the hands of my father or my brother."
"You may seek it now, Suzanne," quoth a voice from the thicket at her back, a voice which came to startle both of them though in different ways. Before they had recovered from their surprise the Marquis de Bellecour stood before them. He was a tall man of some fifty years of age, but so powerful of frame and so scrupulous in dress that he might have conveyed an impression of more youth. His face, though handsome in a high-bred way, was puffed and of an unhealthy yellow. But the eyes were as keen as the mouth was voluptuous, and in his carefully dressed black hair there were few strands of grey.
He came slowly forward, and his lowering glance wandered from his daughter to his secretary in inquiry. At last -
"Well?" he demanded. "What is the matter?"
"It is nothing, Monsieur," his daughter answered him. "A trifling affair 'twixt M. la Boulaye and me, with which I will not trouble you."
"It is not nothing, my lord," cried La Boulaye, his voice vibrating oddly. "It is that I love your daughter and that I have told her of it." He was in a very daring mood that morning.
The Marquis glanced at him in dull amazement. Then a flush crept into his sallow cheeks and mounted to his brow. An inarticulate grunt came from his thick lips.
"Canaille!" he exclaimed, through set teeth. "Can you have presumed so far?"
He carried a riding-switch, and he seemed to grasp it now in a manner peculiarly menacing. But La Boulaye was nothing daunted. Lost he already accounted himself, and on the strength of the logic that if a man must hang, a sheep as well as a lamb may be the cause of it, he took what chances the time afforded him to pile up his debt.
"There is neither insolence nor presumption in what I have done," he answered, giving back the Marquis look for look and scowl for scowl. "You deem it so because I am the secretary to the Marquis de Bellecour and she is the daughter of that same Marquis. But these are no more than the fortuitous circumstances in which we chance to find ourselves. That she is a woman must take rank before the fact that she is