t is the way he would have
expressed it; and he was faced by a new spirit in his daughter which
would surely spring the mine, unless he secured peace by strategy. He
had sense enough to feel the danger.

He did not see, however, any course for diplomacy here, for she had
given him his cue in her last words. As a pure logician he was bound to
take it, though it might lead to drama of a kind painful to them both.

"It is not good enough for the Manor Cartier that you go falling in love
with a nobody from nowhere," he responded.

"I am not falling in love," she rejoined.

"What did you mean, then, by looking at him as you did; by whispering
together; by letting him hold your hand when he left, and him looking at
you as though he'd eat you up--without sugar!"

"I said I was not falling in love," she persisted, quietly, but with
characteristic boldness. "I am in love."

"You are in love with him--with that interloper! Heaven of heavens, do
you speak the truth? Answer me, Zoe Barbille."

She bridled. "Certainly I will answer. Did you think I would let a man
look at me as he did, that I would look at a man as I looked at him,
that I would let him hold my hand as I did, if I did not love him? Have
you ever seen me do it before?"

Her voice was even and quiet--as though she had made up her mind on a
course, and meant to carry it through to the end.

"No, I never saw you look at a man like that, and everything is as you
say, but--" his voice suddenly became uneven and higher--pitched and a
little hoarse, "but he is English, he is an actor--only that; and he is
a Protestant."

"Only that?" she asked, for the tone of his voice was such as one would
use in speaking of a toad or vermin, and she could not bear it. "Is it a
disgrace to be any one of those things?"

"The Barbilles have been here for two hundred years; they have been
French Catholics since the time of"--he was not quite sure--"since the
time of Louis XI.," he added at a venture, and then paused, overcome by
his own rashness.

"Yes, that is a long time," she said, "but what difference does it make?
We are just what we are now, and as if there never had been a Baron of
Beaugard. What is there against Gerard except that he is an actor, that
he is English, and that he is a Protestant? Is there anything?"

"Sacre, is it not enough? An actor, what is that--to pretend to be
someone else and not to be yourself!"

"It would be better for a great many people to be