“I don’t know.”
her chin certainly trembled. And she was looking at me with extreme attention. I made a step nearer to her chair.
“I shall do nothing. I promise you that. Will that do? Do you understand? I shall do nothing whatever, of any kind; and the day after to-morrow I shall be gone.”
What else could I have said? She seemed to drink in my words with the thirsty avidity with which she had emptied the glass of water. She whispered tremulously, in that touching tone I had heard once before on her lips, and which thrilled me again with the same emotion:
“I would believe you. But what about papa”
“He be hanged!” My emotion betrayed itself by the brutality of my tone. “I’ve had enough of your papa. Are you so stupid as to imagine that I am frightened of him? He can’t make me do anything.”
All that sounded feeble to me in the face of her ignorance. But I must conclude that the “accent of sincerity” has, as some people say, a really irresistible power. The effect was far beyond my hopes—and even beyond my conception. To watch the change in the girl was like watching a miracle—the gradual but swift relaxation of her tense glance, of her stiffened muscles, of every fibre of her body. That black, fixed stare into which I had read a tragic meaning more than once, in which I had found a sombre seduction, was perfectly empty now, void of all consciousness whatever, and not even aware any longer of my presence; it had become a little sleepy, in the Jacobus fashion.
