“Is it possible that love can die?” she said with sudden, unreasoning vehemence. “Methought that the passion which you once felt for me would outlast the span of human life. Is there nothing left of that love, Percy … which might help you … to bridge over that sad estrangement?”

His massive figure seemed, while she spoke thus to him, to stiffen still more, the strong mouth hardened, a look of relentless obstinacy crept into the habitually lazy blue eyes.

“With what object, I pray you, Madame?” he asked coldly.

“I do not understand you.”

“Yet ’tis simple enough,” he said with sudden bitterness, which seemed literally to surge through his words, though he was making visible efforts to suppress it, “I humbly put the question to you, for my slow wits are unable to grasp the cause of this, your ladyship’s sudden new mood. Is it that you have the taste to renew the devilish sport which you played so successfully last year? Do you wish to see me once more a love-sick suppliant at your feet, so that you might again have the pleasure of kicking me aside, like a troublesome lap-dog?”

She had succeeded in rousing him for the moment: and again she looked straight at him, for it was thus she remembered him a year ago.

“Percy! I entreat you!” she whispered, “can we not bury the past?”

“Pardon me, Madame, but I understood you to say that your desire was to dwell in it.”

“Nay! I spoke not of that past, Percy!” she said, while a tone of tenderness crept into her voice. “Rather did I speak of the time when you loved me still! and I … oh! I was vain and frivolous; your wealth and position allured me: I married you, hoping in my heart that your great love for me would beget in me a love for you … but, alas! …”

The moon had sunk low down behind a bank of clouds. In the east a soft grey light was beginning to chase away the heavy mantle of the night. He could only see her graceful outline now, the small queenly head, with its wealth of reddish golden curls, and the glittering gems forming the small, star-shaped, red flower which she wore as a diadem in her hair.

“Twenty-four hours after our marriage, Madame, the Marquis de St. Cyr and all his family perished on the guillotine, and the popular rumour reached me that it was the wife of Sir Percy Blakeney who helped to send them there.”

“Nay! I myself told you the truth of that odious tale.”

“Not till after it had been recounted to me by strangers, with all its horrible details.”

“And you believed them then and there,” she said with great vehemence, “without a proof or question—you believed that I, whom you vowed you loved more than life, whom you professed you worshipped, that I could do a thing so base as these strangers chose to recount. You thought I meant to deceive you about it all—that I ought to have spoken before I married you: yet, had you listened, I would have told you that up to the very morning on which St. Cyr went to the guillotine, I was straining every nerve, using every influence I possessed, to save him and his family. But my pride sealed my lips, when your love seemed to perish, as if under the knife of that same guillotine. Yet I would have told you how I was duped! Aye! I, whom that same popular rumour had endowed with the sharpest wits in France! I was tricked into doing this thing, by men who knew how to play upon my love for an only brother, and my desire for revenge. Was it unnatural?”

Her voice became choked with tears. She paused for a moment or two, trying to regain some sort of composure. She looked appealingly at him, almost as if he were her judge. He had allowed her to speak