At that the princess blushed still more, and her eyes were dim and shone; for she was very deeply touched at his misery and at the sad prospect of the death of so gallant a gentleman for love.  Thus she could scarcely speak for emotion; and the marquis, seeing her emotion, was himself much affected; and she rose from her chair and bent over him, and whispered comfort to him.  Then she leant down, and very lightly touched his forehead with her lips; and he felt her eyelashes, that were wet with her tears, brush the skin of his forehead; and then she sobbed, and covered her face with her hands.  Indeed, his state seemed to her most pitiful.

Thus Monsieur de Merosailles had won one of his three kisses; yet, strange to tell, there was no triumph in him, but he now perceived the baseness of his device; and the sweet kindness of the princess, working together with the great beauty of her softened manner, so affected him that he thought no more of his wager, and could not endure to carry on his deception.  And nothing would serve his turn but to confess to the princess what he had done, and humble himself in the dust before her, and entreat her to pardon him and let him find forgiveness.  Therefore, impelled by these feelings, after he had lain still a few moments listening to the princess’s weeping, he leapt suddenly out of the bed, showing himself fully clothed under the bedgown which he now eagerly tore off, and he rubbed all the white he could from his cheeks; and then he fell on his knees before the princess, crying to her that he had played the meanest trick on her, and that he was a scoundrel and no gentleman, and yet that, unless she forgave him, he should in very truth die.  Nay, he would not consent to live, unless he could win from her pardon for his deceit.  And in all this he was now most absolutely in earnest, wondering only how he had not been as passionately enamoured of her from the first as he had feigned himself to be.  For a man in love can never conceive himself out of it; nor he that is out of it, in it:  for, if he can, he is halfway to the one or the other, however little he may know it.

At first the princess sat as though she were turned to stone.  But when he had finished his confession, and she understood the trick that had been played upon her, and how not only her kiss but also her tears had been won from her by fraud; and when she thought, as she did, that the marquis was playing another trick upon her, and that there was no more truth nor honesty in his present protestations than in those which went before—­she fell into great shame and into a great rage; and her eyes flashed like the eyes of her father himself, as she rose to her feet and looked down on Monsieur de Merosailles as he knelt imploring her.  Now her face turned pale from red, and she set her lips, and she drew her gown close round her lest his touch should defile it (so the unhappy gentleman understood the gesture), and she daintily picked her steps round him lest by chance she should happen to come in contact with so foul a thing.  Thus she walked toward the door, and, having reached it, she turned and said to him: