! What! After
that horrible night when the prefect examined us at Versailles,
pronounced that I was an attempted murderess--Heaven! if Louvois had
not stood our friend with Louis, what would have been the
consequence!--Raoul told me all: That this man was in truth the Duc de
Vannes; that, if he once knew it, or Louis guessed it, it meant ruin;
that all his father's vast estates would go to him instead of to
Raoul, who had long felt secure of them; that, worse than all, Louis
would never pardon the attack upon his friend's son, would know that
he had been struck down from behind by a foul blow, not fairly in a
duel. And now he is here, alive in my house--has crossed our path
again; is doubtless on his way to the king to tell him the truth,
prove his false condemnation to the galleys, claim all that is his.
God! if he does that I shall never be Raoul's wife--never, never,
never!"

As she had once drunk feverishly of the wine standing on the inn
table, while it seemed that to the man who ought, even then, to have
been her husband his doom was approaching from St. Georges's avenging
sword, so she now went to a cabinet and took from it a flask of strong
waters and swallowed a dram. The habit had grown on her of late, had
often been resorted to since the night when she--hitherto a woman with
no worse failings than that of lightness of manner and with, for her
greatest weakness, a mad, infatuated passion for Raoul de
Roquemaure--had struck her knife deep between his shoulders, and had
become a murderess in heart and almost one in actual fact.

Then, having swallowed the liquor, she mused again.

"What best to do? I can not slay him here in my own house--though I
would do so if I could compass it. He called me 'wanton'; read me
aright! For that alone I would do it! Yet, how? How? And if he goes
free from here 'tis not a dozen leagues to Louis; doubtless he knows
now his history, he will see him--Louvois is dead and gone to his
master, the devil--he is a free man."

Yet as she said the words "a free man" she started, almost gasped.

"A free man!" she repeated. "A free man! Ha! _is_ he free?"

Through her brain there ran a multitude of fresh thoughts, of
recollections. "A free man!" Yet he had been condemned, she knew, to
the galleys _en perpetuite_; there was no freedom, never any pardon
for those so sentenced. Once condemned, always condemned; no appeal
possible, their rights gone forever, slaves till their day of death;