“I flatter myself?” he cried, his voice choked with rage. “It may be I do now, Madame, but did I flatter myself when you wrote me this note?” And he drew it out and flourished it in her face. “Did I imagine when I read this? Or is it not in your hand? It is a forgery, perhaps,” he continued bitterly. “Or it means nothing? Nothing, this note bidding me be at Madame St. Lo’s at an hour before midnight—it means nothing? At an hour before midnight, Madame!”
“On Saturday night? The night before last night?”
“On Saturday night, the night before last night! But Madame knows nothing of it? Nothing, I suppose?”
She shrugged her shoulders and smiled cheerfully on him. “Oh yes, I wrote it,” she said. “But what of that, M. de Tignonville?”
“What of that?”
“Yes, Monsieur, what of that? Did you think it was written out of love for you?”
He was staggered for the moment by her coolness. “Out of what, then?” he cried hoarsely. “Out of what, then, if not out of love?”
“Why, out of pity, my little gentleman!” she answered sharply. “And trouble thrown away, it seems. Love!” And she laughed so merrily and spontaneously it cut him to the heart. “No; but you said a dainty thing or two, and smiled a smile; and like a fool, and like a woman, I was sorry for the innocent calf that bleated so prettily on its way to the butcher’s! And I would lock you up, and save your life, I thought, until the blood-letting was over. Now you have it, M. de Tignonville, and I hope you like it.”
Like it, when every word she uttered stripped him of the selfish illusions in which he had wrapped himself against the blasts of ill-fortune? Like it, when the prospect of her charms had bribed him from the path of fortitude,
