.

He took her hand in his, and bent his lips to it, and with the warmth of
his kiss upon it, she felt a moisture like a tear.

"I must go, dear," he said, after a little while.

"Why? Why?" she repeated obstinately. "Am I nothing then? Is my life
of no account? My sorrows? My fears? My misery? Oh!" she added with
vehement bitterness, "why should it always be others? What are others
to you and to me, Percy?... Are we not happy here?... Have you not
fulfilled to its uttermost that self-imposed duty to people who can be
nothing to us?... Is not your life ten thousand times more precious to
me than the lives of ten thousand others?"

Even through the darkness, and because his face was so close to hers,
she could see a quaint little smile playing round the corners of his
mouth.

"Nay, m'dear," he said gently, "'tis not ten thousand lives that call to
me to-day... only one at best.... Don't you hate to think of that poor
little old cure sitting in the midst of his ruined pride and hopes:
the jewels so confidently entrusted to his care, stolen from him, he
waiting, perhaps, in his little presbytery for the day when those brutes
will march him to prison and to death.... Nay! I think a little sea
voyage and English country air would suit the Abbe Foucquet, m'dear, and
I only mean to ask him to cross the Channel with me!..."

"Percy!" she pleaded.

"Oh! I know! I know!" he rejoined with that short deprecatory sigh of
his, which seemed always to close any discussion between them on that
point, "you are thinking of that absurd duel..." He laughed lightly,
good-humouredly, and his eyes gleamed with merriment.

"La, m'dear!" he said gaily, "will you not reflect a moment? Could
I refuse the challenge before His Royal Highness and the ladies? I
couldn't. ... Faith! that was it.... Just a case of couldn't.... Fate
did it all... the quarrel... my interference... the challenge.... HE had
planned it all of course.... Let us own that he is a brave man, seeing
that he and I are not even yet, for that beating he gave me on the
Calais cliffs."

"Yes! he has planned it all," she retorted vehemently. "The quarrel
to-night, your journey to France, your meeting with him face to face at
a given hour and place where he can most readily, most easily close the
death-trap upon you."

This time he broke into a laugh. A good, hearty laugh, full of the joy
of living, of the madness and intoxication of a bold adventure, a laugh
that had not o