Her hearer did not answer; the words made her heart ache; they cut her to the soul.  It was not for the first time that the awful desolation of his future had been present before her; but it was the first time that the fate to which she would pass away and leave him had been so directly in words before her.  Cigarette, obeying the generous impulses of her better nature, and abandoning self with the same reckless impetuosity with which a moment before she would, if she could, have sacrificed her rival, saw the advantage gained, and pursued it with rapid skill.  She was pleading against herself; no matter.  In that instant she was capable of crucifying herself, and only remembering mercy to the absent.

“I have heard,” she went on vehemently, for the utterance to which she forced herself was very cruel to her, “that you of the Noblesse are stanch as steel to your own people.  It is the best virtue that you have.  Well, he is of your people.  Will you go away in your negligent indifference, and leave him to eat his heart out in bitterness and misery?  He was your brother’s friend; he was known to you in his early time; you said so.  And are you cold enough and cruel enough, Milady, not to make one effort to redeem him out of bondage?—­to go back to your palaces, and your pleasures, and your luxuries, and your flatteries, and be happy, while this man is left on bearing his yoke here?—­and it is a yoke that galls, that kills!—­bearing it until, in some day of desperation, a naked blade cuts its way to his heart, and makes its pulse cease forever?  If you do, you patricians are worse still than I thought you!”

Venetia heard her without interruption; a great sadness came over her face as the vivid phrases followed each other.  She was too absorbed in the subject of them to heed the challenge and the insolence of their manner.  She knew that the Little One who spoke them loved him, though so tenacious to conceal her love; and she was touched, not less by the magnanimity which, for his sake, sought to release him from the African service, than by the hopelessness of his coming years as thus prefigured before her.

“Your reproaches are unneeded,” she replied, slowly and wearily.  “I could not abandon one who was once the friend of my family to such a fate as you picture without very great pain.  But I do not see how to alter this fate, as you think I could do with so much ease.  I am not in its secret; I do not know the reason of its seeming suicide; I have no more connection with its intricacies than you have.  This gentleman has chosen his own path; it is not for me to change his choice or spy into his motives.”

Cigarette’s flashing, searching eyes bent all their brown light on her.

“Mme. Corona, you are courageous; to those who are so, all things are possible.”

“A great fallacy!  You must have seen many courageous men vanquished.  But what would you imply by it?”

“That you can help this man, if you will.”