“You expect me to believe that?”

“It’s the truth; I couldn’t!”

I laughed sceptically; and he flinched, but repeated that what he had said was only the truth.  “I don’t understand; it was all beyond me,” he added huskily.

“What was it you said to her?”

“I spoke her name—­’Madame d’Armand.’”

“You said more than that!”

“I asked her if she would let me see her again.”

“What else?”

“Nothing,” he answered humbly.  “And then she—­then for a moment it seemed—­for a moment she didn’t seem to be able to speak—­”

“I should think not!” I shouted, and burst out at him with satirical laughter.  He stood patiently enduring it, his lowered eyes following the aimless movements of his hands, which were twisting and untwisting his flexible straw hat; and it might have struck me as nearer akin to tragedy rather than to a thing for laughter:  this spectacle of a grown man so like a schoolboy before the master, shamefaced over a stammered confession.

“But she did say something to you, didn’t she?” I asked finally, with the gentleness of a cross-examining lawyer.

“Yes—­after that moment.”

“Well, what was it?”

“She said, ‘Not now!’ That was all.”

“I suppose that was all she had breath for!  It was just the inconsequent and meaningless thing a frightened woman would say!”

“Meaningless?” he repeated, and looked up wonderingly.

“Did you take it for an appointment?” I roared, quite out of patience, and losing my temper completely.

“No, no, no!  She said only that, and then—­”

“Then she turned and ran away from you!”

“Yes,” he said, swallowing painfully.

“That pleased you,” I stormed, “to frighten a woman in the woods—­to make her feel that she can’t walk here in safety!  You enjoy doing things like that?”

He looked at me with disconcerting steadiness for a moment, and, without offering any other response, turned aside, resting his arm against the trunk of a tree and gazing into the quiet forest.

I set about packing my traps, grumbling various sarcasms, the last mutterings of a departed storm, for already I realised that I had taken out my own mortification upon him, and I was stricken with remorse.  And yet, so contrarily are we made, I continued to be unkind while in my heart I was asking pardon of him.  I tried to make my reproaches gentler, to lend my voice a hint of friendly humour, but in spite of me the one sounded gruffer and the other sourer with everything I said.  This was the worse because of the continued silence of the victim:  he did not once answer, nor by the slightest movement alter his attitude until I had finished—­and more than finished.

“There—­and that’s all!” I said desperately, when the things were strapped and I had slung them to my shoulder.  “Let’s be off, in heaven’s name!”