At last, as if the thing were concerted — and the clumsy Lord of Gavrillac was the last man in the world to cover his tracks — his godfather rose and, upon a pretext of desiring to survey the garden, sauntered through the windows on to the terrace, over whose white stone balustrade the geraniums trailed in a scarlet riot.  Thence he vanished among the foliage below.

“Now we can talk more intimately,” said madame.  “Come here, and sit beside me.”  She indicated the empty half of the settee she occupied.

Andre-Louis went obediently, but a little uncomfortably.  “You know,” she said gently, placing a hand upon his arm, “that you have behaved very ill, that your godfather’s resentment is very justly founded?”

“Madame, if I knew that, I should be the most unhappy, the most despairing of men.”  And he explained himself, as he had explained himself on Sunday to his godfather.  “What I did, I did because it was the only means to my hand in a country in which justice was paralyzed by Privilege to make war upon an infamous scoundrel who had killed my best friend — a wanton, brutal act of murder, which there was no law to punish.  And as if that were not enough — forgive me if I speak with the utmost frankness, madame — he afterwards debauched the woman I was to have married.”

“Ah, mon Dieu!” she cried out.

“Forgive me.  I know that it is horrible.  You perceive, perhaps, what I suffered, how I came to be driven.  That last affair of which I am guilty — the riot that began in the Feydau Theatre and afterwards enveloped the whole city of Nantes — was provoked by this.”

“Who was she, this girl?”

It was like a woman, he thought, to fasten upon the unessential.

“Oh, a theatre girl, a poor fool of whom I have no regrets.  La Binet was her name.  I was a player at the time in her father’s troupe.  That was after the Rennes business, when it was necessary to hide from such justice as exists in France — the gallows’ justice for unfortunates who are not ‘born.’  This added wrong led me to provoke a riot in the theatre.”

“Poor boy,” she said tenderly.  “Only a woman’s heart can realize what you must have suffered; and because of that I can so readily forgive you.  But now... "

“Ah, but you don’t understand, madame.  If to-day I thought that I had none but personal grounds for having lent a hand in the holy work of abolishing Privilege, I think I should cut my throat.  My true justification lies in the insincerity of those who intended that the convocation of the States General should be a sham, mere dust in the eyes of the nation.”

“Was it not, perhaps, wise to have been insincere in such a matter?”

He looked at her blankly.

“Can it ever be wise, madame, to be insincere?”

“Oh, indeed it can; believe me, who am twice your age, and know my world.”

“I should say, madame, that nothing is wise that complicates existence; and I know of nothing that so complicates it as insincerity.  Consider a moment the complications that have arisen out of this.”