She swept him a curtsey, silently, without looking at him.  He made an eager pace nearer her.

“Lorance,” he cried in a low, rapid voice, “I see I am out of your graces.  Now, by Our Lady, what’s life worth to me if you will not take me back again?  I admit I have tried to ruin the Comte de Mar.  Is that any marvel, since he is my rival with you?  Last March, when I was hiding here and watched from my window the gay M. de Mar come airily in, day after day, to see and make love to you, was it any marvel that I swore to bring his proud head to the dust?”

Now she turned to him and met his gaze squarely.

“The means you employed was the marvel,” she said.  “If you did not approve of his visits, you had only to tell him so.  He had been ready to defend to you his right to make them.  But you never showed him your face; of course, had you, you could not have become his father’s housemate and Judas.  Oh, I blush to know that the same blood runs in your veins and mine!”

“You speak hard words, mademoiselle,” Lucas returned, keeping his temper with a stern effort.  “You forget that we live in France in war-time, and not in the kingdom of heaven.  I was toiling for more than my own revenges.  I was working at your cousin Mayenne’s commands, to aid our holy cause, for the preservation of the Catholic Church and the Catholic kingdom of France.”

“Your conversion is sudden, then; only an hour ago you were working for nothing and no one but Paul de Lorraine.”

“Come, come, Lorance,” Mayenne interposed, his caution setting him ever on the side of compromise.  “Paul is no worse than the rest of us.  He hates his enemies, and so do we all; he works against them to the best of his power, and so do we all.  They are Kingsmen, we are Leaguers; they fight for their side, and we fight for ours.  If we plot against them, they plot against us; we murder lest we be murdered.  We cannot scruple over our means.  Nom de dieu, mademoiselle, what do you expect?  Civil war is not a dancing-school.”

“Mademoiselle is right,” Lucas said humbly, refusing any defence.  “We have been using cowardly means, weapons unworthy of Christian gentlemen.  And I, at least, cannot plead M. le Duc’s excuse that I was blinded in my zeal for the Cause.  For I know and you know there is but one cause with me.  I went to kill St. Quentin because I was promised you for it, as I would have gone to kill the Pope himself.  This is my excuse; I did it to win you.  There is no crime in God’s calendar I would not commit for that.”

He had possessed himself of her hand and was bending over her, burning her with his hot eyes.  Mass of lies as the man was, in this last sentence I knew he spoke the truth.

She strove to free herself from him with none of the flattered pride in his declaration which he had perhaps looked for.  Instead, she eyed him with positive fear, as if she saw no way of escape from his rampant desire.