“I do think of her.  God bless her!”

“Must I tell her that Monseigneur planted his feet like one of these wild cattle, and wheeled, and fled from the contemplation of a throne?”

“You will dress it up in your own felicitous way, monsieur.”

“What do you wish me to say?”

“That I decline.  I have not pressed the embarrassing question of why I was not recalled long ago.  I reserve to myself the privilege of declining without saying why I decline.”

“He must be made to change his mind, monsieur!” Madame de Ferrier exclaimed.

“I am not a man that changes his mind every time the clock strikes.”

I took the padlocked book out of my breast and laid it upon the table.  I looked at the priest, not at her.  The padlocked book seemed to have no more to do with the conversation, than a hat or a pair of gloves.

I saw, as one sees from the side of the eye, the scarlet rush of blood and the snow-white rush of pallor which covered her one after the other.  The moment was too strenuous.  I could not spare her.  She had to bear it with me.

She set her clenched hands on her knees.

“Sire!”

I faced her.  The coldest look I ever saw in her gray eyes repelled me, as she deliberately said—­

“You are not such a fool!”

I stared back as coldly and sternly, and deliberately answered—­

“I am—­just—­such a fool!”

“Consider how any person who might be to blame for your decision, would despise you for it afterwards!”

“A boy in the first flush of his youth,” Abbe Edgeworth said, his fine jaws squared with a grin, “might throw away a kingdom for some woman who took his fancy, and whom he could not have perhaps, unless he did throw his kingdom away.  And after he had done it he would hate the woman.  But a young man in his strength doesn’t do such things!”

“A king who hasn’t spirit to be a king!” Madame de Ferrier mocked.

I mercilessly faced her down.

“What is there about me?  Sum me up.  I am robbed on every side by any one who cares to fleece me.  Whenever I am about to accomplish anything I fall down as if knocked on the head!”

She rose from her seat.

“You let yourself be robbed because you are princely!  You have plainly left behind you every weakness of your childhood.  Look at him in his strength, Monsieur Abbe!  He has sucked in the vigor of a new country!  The failing power of an old line of kings is renewed in him!  You could not have nourished such a dauphin for France in your exiled court!  Burying in the American soil has developed what you see for yourself—­the king!”

“He is a handsome man,” Abbe Edgeworth quietly admitted.

“Oh, let his beauty alone!  Look at his manhood—­his kinghood!”

“Of what use is his kinghood if he will not exercise it?”

“He must!”

She turned upon me fiercely.