“You acted very well,” said she, without reflecting.

“Of course.  I am an excellent actor.”

“And why this sudden change?”

“In response to the change in you.  You have grown weary of your part of cruel madam — a dull part, believe me, and unworthy of your talents.  Were I a woman and had I your loveliness and your grace, Climene, I should disdain to use them as weapons of offence.”

“Loveliness and grace!” she echoed, feigning amused surprise.  But the vain baggage was mollified.  “When was it that you discovered this beauty and this grace, M. Scaramouche?”

He looked at her a moment, considering the sprightly beauty of her, the adorable femininity that from the first had so irresistibly attracted him.

“One morning when I beheld you rehearsing a love-scene with Leandre.”

He caught the surprise that leapt to her eyes, before she veiled them under drooping lids from his too questing gaze.

“Why, that was the first time you saw me.”

“I had no earlier occasion to remark your charms.”

“You ask me to believe too much,” said she, but her tone was softer than he had ever known it yet.

“Then you’ll refuse to believe me if I confess that it was this grace and beauty that determined my destiny that day by urging me to join your father’s troupe.”

At that she became a little out of breath.  There was no longer any question of finding an outlet for resentment.  Resentment was all forgotten.

“But why?  With what object?”

“With the object of asking you one day to be my wife.”

She halted under the shock of that, and swung round to face him.  Her glance met his own without, shyness now; there was a hardening glitter in her eyes, a faint stir of colour in her cheeks.  She suspected him of an unpardonable mockery.

“You go very fast, don’t you?” she asked him, with heat.

“I do.  Haven’t you observed it?  I am a man of sudden impulses.  See what I have made of the Binet troupe in less than a couple of months.  Another might have laboured for a year and not achieved the half of it.  Shall I be slower in love than in work?  Would it be reasonable to expect it?  I have curbed and repressed myself not to scare you by precipitancy.  In that I have done violence to my feelings, and more than all in using the same cold aloofness with which you chose to treat me.  I have waited — oh! so patiently — until you should tire of that mood of cruelty.”

“You are an amazing man,” said she, quite colourlessly.

“I am,” he agreed with her.  “It is only the conviction that I am not commonplace that has permitted me to hope as I have hoped.”

Mechanically, and as if by tacit consent, they resumed their walk.

“And I ask you to observe,” he said, “when you complain that I go very fast, that, after all, I have so far asked you for nothing.”