“Be silent!”

“With pleasure,” she returned.  “Only when it happens don’t say that you were not warned.  You think that she does not hear from him—­”

“How can she hear?” The words were wrung from him.

Madame St. Lo’s contempt passed all limits.  “How can she!” she retorted.  “You trail a woman across France, and let her sit by herself, and lie by herself, and all but drown by herself, and you ask how she hears from her lover?  You leave her old servants about her, and you ask how she communicates with him?”

“You know nothing!” he snarled.

“I know this,” she retorted.  “I saw her sitting this morning, and smiling and weeping at the same time!  Was she thinking of you, Monsieur?  Or of him?  She was looking at the hills through tears; a blue mist hung over them, and I’ll wager she saw some one’s eyes gazing and some one’s hand beckoning out of the blue!”

“Curse you!” he cried, tormented in spite of himself.  “You love to make mischief!”

“No!” she answered swiftly.  “For ’twas not I made the match.  But go your way, go your way, Monsieur, and see what kind of a welcome you’ll get!”

“I will,” Count Hannibal growled.  And he started along the bank to rejoin his wife.

The light in his eyes had died down.  Yet would they have been more sombre, and his face more harsh, had he known the mind of the woman to whom he was hastening.  The Countess had begged to be left alone; alone, she found the solitude she had craved a cruel gift.  She had saved the packet.  She had fulfilled her trust.  But only to experience, the moment the deed was done, the full poignancy of remorse.  Before the act, while the choice had lain with her, the betrayal of her husband had loomed large; now she saw that to treat him as she had treated him was the true betrayal, and that even for his own sake, and to save him from a fearful sin, it had become her to destroy the letters.

Now, it was no longer her duty to him which loomed large, but her duty to the innocent, to the victims of the massacre which she might have stayed, to the people of her faith whom she had abandoned, to the women and children whose death-warrant she had preserved.  Now, she perceived that a part more divine had never fallen to woman, nor a responsibility so heavy been laid upon woman.  Nor guilt more dread!

She writhed in misery, thinking of it.  What had she done?  She could hear afar off the sounds of the camp; an occasional outcry, a snatch of laughter.  And the cry and the laughter rang in her ears, a bitter mockery.  This summer camp, to what was it the prelude?  This forbearance on her husband’s part, in what would it end?  Were not the one and the other cruel make-believes?  Two days, and the men who laughed beside the water would slay and torture with equal zest.  A little, and the husband who now chose to be generous would show himself in his true colours.  And it was for the sake of such as these that she had played the coward.  That she had laid up for herself endless remorse.  That henceforth the cries of the innocent would haunt her dreams.