“Well?” he said, in a soft, still voice.

Diane looked at the tender petitioner; then she lowered her eyes slowly, dropping their lids with a movement of noble modesty.  None but a monster would have been capable of imagining hypocrisy in the graceful undulation of the neck with which the princess again lifted her charming head, to look once more into the eager eyes of that great man.

“Can I? ought I?” she murmured, with a gesture of hesitation, gazing at d’Arthez with a sublime expression of dreamy tenderness.  “Men have so little faith in things of this kind; they think themselves so little bound to be discreet!”

“Ah! if you distrust me, why am I here?” cried d’Arthez.

“Oh, friend!” she said, giving to the exclamation the grace of an involuntary avowal, “when a woman attaches herself for life, think you she calculates?  It is not question of refusal (how could I refuse you anything?), but the idea of what you may think of me if I speak.  I would willingly confide to you the strange position in which I am at my age; but what would you think of a woman who could reveal the secret wounds of her married life?  Turenne kept his word to robbers; do I not owe to my torturers the honor of a Turenne?”

“Have you passed your word to say nothing?”

“Monsieur de Cadignan did not think it necessary to bind me to secrecy—­ You are asking more than my soul!  Tyrant! you want me to bury my honor itself in your breast,” she said, casting upon d’Arthez a look, by which she gave more value to her coming confidence than to her personal self.

“You must think me a very ordinary man, if you fear any evil, no matter what, from me,” he said, with ill-concealed bitterness.

“Forgive me, friend,” she replied, taking his hand in hers caressingly, and letting her fingers wander gently over it.  “I know your worth.  You have related to me your whole life; it is noble, it is beautiful, it is sublime, and worthy of your name; perhaps, in return, I owe you mine.  But I fear to lower myself in your eyes by relating secrets which are not wholly mine.  How can you believe—­you, a man of solitude and poesy—­the horrors of social life?  Ah! you little think when you invent your dramas that they are far surpassed by those that are played in families apparently united.  You are wholly ignorant of certain gilded sorrows.”

“I know all!” he cried.

“No, you know nothing.”

D’Arthez felt like a man lost on the Alps of a dark night, who sees, at the first gleam of dawn, a precipice at his feet.  He looked at the princess with a bewildered air, and felt a cold chill running down his back.  Diane thought for a moment that her man of genius was a weakling, but a flash from his eyes reassured her.