ed amorous combats. Yet though I doubt not it was her first
assault-at-arms of this description, she was more than a match for me,
as her next words proved.

"Monsieur, I thank you for enlightening me. I cannot, indeed, have
spoken the truth three nights ago. You are right, I do not doubt it now,
and you lift from me a load of shame."

Dieu! It was like a thrust in the high lines, and its hurtful violence
staggered me. I was finished, it seemed. The victory was hers, and she
but a child with no practice of Cupid's art of fence!

"Now, monsieur," she added, "now that you are satisfied that you
did wrong to say I loved you, now that we have disposed of that
question--adieu!"

"A moment yet!" I cried. "We have disposed of that, but there was
another point, an earlier one, which for the moment we have disregarded.
We have--you have disproved the love I was so presumptuous as to believe
you fostered for me. We have yet to reckon with the love I bear you,
mademoiselle, and of that we shall not be able to dispose so readily."

With a gesture of weariness or of impatience, she turned aside. "What is
it you want? What do you seek to gain by thus provoking me? To win your
wager?" Her voice was cold. Who to have looked upon that childlike face,
upon those meek, pondering eyes, could have believed her capable of so
much cruelty?

"There can no longer be any question of my wager; I have lost and paid
it," said I.

She looked up suddenly. Her brows met in a frown of bewilderment.
Clearly this interested her. Again was she drawn.

"How?" she asked. "You have lost and paid it?"

"Even so. That odious, cursed, infamous wager, was the something which
I hinted at so often as standing between you and me. The confession that
so often I was on the point of making--that so often you urged me to
make--concerned that wager. Would to God, Roxalanne, that I had told
you!" I cried, and it seemed to me that the sincerity ringing in my
voice drove some of the harshness from her countenance, some of the
coldness from her glance.

"Unfortunately," I pursued, "it always seemed to me either not yet time,
or already too late. Yet so soon as I regained my liberty, my first
thought was of that. While the wager existed I might not ask you to
become my wife, lest I should seem to be carrying out the original
intention which embarked me upon the business of wooing you, and brought
me here to Languedoc. And so my first step was to seek out Chatelle