"I shall marry Antoine de Cavannes. He loves me, I know, and is as true as steel in his love. He guards me here and will see I come to no harm."
He moved uneasily under her glance, and then looking about him lowered his voice.
"He is not true to you, Lucette. He is going to betray you."
"Jacques, Jacques, how dare you! Would you slander him, too? Have a care lest I tell him."
"Listen to me; what I say is the truth. He thinks you know where Mademoiselle de Malincourt can be found and the prisoners; there is a price of a thousand crowns on their heads, and he means to use you to find them and win the money."
"Holy Virgin! now am I a miserable and desolate girl," cried Lucette in a fresh paroxysm of distress. "Oh, it cannot be true, it cannot!"
"It is true, I swear it," he replied very earnestly, and gave her a garbled account of what had passed between himself and Antoine.
As she listened her agitation mounted, and when he finished she exclaimed, as if unstrung in her emotion—
"I will never tell him, I will never tell him." Then as if realizing she had betrayed herself, she stared at him in distress and alarm, and protested with excited, voluble earnestness: "I did not mean that, Jacques; I did not mean that. Do not misunderstand me. I meant nothing," and she clung to his arm with piteous entreating glances. "What I meant was I know nothing. You understand that, don't you, don't you? Oh, thank Heaven, you warned me. Jacques, dear Jacques, I thank you from my soul, I thank you. Oh, what might I not have done in my blindness!"
So she did know after all, thought Dauban; and his selfish love being satisfied by what she had done and said, his greed began to grow stronger again.
