the folly he had committed.

Everything was lost now, utterly and irretrievably--lost as a dozen
other fine emprises had been by his sudden and ungoverned frenzy. God!
What a fool he was! What a cursed, drivelling fool! What, after all, was
a kiss or two, compared with all the evil that might now result from his
interference? Haply Marius would have taken them and departed, and at
midnight they would have been free to go from Condillac.

The future would not have been lacking in opportunities to seek out and
kill Marius for that insult.

Why could he not have left the matter to the future? But now, with
Florimond to be murdered on the morrow at La Rochette, himself likely
to be murdered within the hour at Condillac, Valerie was at their mercy
utterly.

Wildly and vainly did he strive even then to cover up the foolish thing
that he had done. He bowed apologetically to Marius; he waved his hands
and filled the air with Italian phrases, frenziedly uttered, as if by
the very vigour of them he sought to drive explanation into his master's
brain. Marius watched and listened, but his rage nowise abated; it grew,
instead, as if that farrago of a language he did not understand were
but an added insult. An oath was all he uttered. Then he swung round
and caught Garnache's sword from the chair beside him, where it still
rested, and Garnache in that moment cursed the oversight. Whipping
the long, keen blade from its sheath, Marius bore down upon the rash
meddler.

"Par Dieu!" he swore between his teeth. "We'll see the colour of your
dirty blood, you that lay hands upon a gentleman."

But before he could send home the weapon, before Garnache could move to
defend himself, Valerie had slipped between them. Marius looked into
her white, determined face, and was smitten with surprise. What was this
hind to her that she should interfere at the risk of taking the sword
herself?

Then a slow smile spread upon his face. He was smarting still under
her disdain and resistance, as well as under a certain sense of the
discomfiture this fellow had put upon him. He saw a way to hurt her, to
abase her pride, and cut her to the very soul with shame.

"You are singularly concerned in this man's life," said he, an odious
undercurrent of meaning in his voice.

"I would not have you murder him," she answered, "for doing no more than
madame your mother bade him."

"I make no doubt he has proved a very excellent guard," he sneered.

Even no