“Ah!  I calculate, I bargain?  Well, listen.  Yes, it is true.  I did value my reputation as an honest woman more highly, a thousand times more, than my life; but, above my life and my reputation, I valued you.  You are drowning, you say.  Well, then, let us flee.  One word from you, and I leave all,—­honor, country, family, husband, children.  Say one word, and I follow you without turning my head, without a regret, without a remorse.”

Her whole body was shivering from head to foot; her bosom rose and fell; her eyes shone with unbearable brilliancy.

Thanks to the violence of her action, her dress, put on in great haste, had opened, and her dishevelled hair flowed in golden masses over her bosom and her shoulders, which matched the purest marble in their dazzling whiteness.

And in a voice trembling with pent-up passion, now sweet and soft like a tender caress, and now deep and sonorous like a bell, she went on,—­

“What keeps us?  Since you have escaped from prison, the greatest difficulty is overcome.  I thought at first of taking our girl, your girl, Jacques; but she is very ill; and besides a child might betray us.  If we go alone, they will never overtake us.  We will have money enough, I am sure, Jacques.  We will flee to those distant countries which appear in books of travels in such fairy-like beauty.  There, unknown, forgotten, unnoticed, our life will be one unbroken enjoyment.  You will never again say that I bargain.  I will be yours, entirely, and solely yours, body and soul, your wife, your slave.”

She threw her head back, and with half-closed eyes, bending with her whole person toward him, she said in melting tones,—­

“Say, Jacques, will you?  Jacques!”

He pushed her aside with a fierce gesture.  It seemed to him almost a sacrilege that she also, like Dionysia, should propose to him to flee.

“Rather the galleys!” he cried.

She turned deadly pale; a spasm of rage convulsed her features; and drawing back, stiff and stern, she said,—­

“What else do you want?”

“Your help to save me,” he replied.

“At the risk of ruining myself?”

He made no reply.

Then she, who had just now been all humility, raised herself to her full height, and in a tone of bitterest sarcasm said slowly,—­

“In other words, you want me to sacrifice myself, and at the same time all my family.  For your sake?  Yes, but even more for Miss Chandore’s sake.  And you think that it is quite a simple thing.  I am the past to you, satiety, disgust:  she is the future to you, desire, happiness.  And you think it quite natural that the old love should make a footstool of her love and her honor for the new love?  You think little of my being disgraced, provided she be honored; of my weeping bitterly, if she but smile?  Well, no, no! it is madness in you to come and ask me to save you, so that you may throw yourself into the arms of another.  It is madness, when in order to tear you from Dionysia, I am ready to ruin myself, provided only that you be lost to her forever.”