ossible that
you can have secrets that I do not know? How can you control Fate?"

"Now, when you confirm the gift of the heart that you have already given
me, I am far too happy to know exactly how to answer you. I can trust
you, Antoinette; I shall have no suspicion, no unfounded jealousy of
you. But if accident should set you free, we shall be one----"

"Accident, Armand?" (With that little dainty turn of the head that seems
to say so many things, a gesture that such women as the Duchess can use
on light occasions, as a great singer can act with her voice.) "Pure
accident," she repeated. "Mind that. If anything should happen to M. de
Langeais by your fault, I should never be yours."

And so they parted, mutually content. The Duchess had made a pact
that left her free to prove to the world by words and deeds that M. de
Montriveau was no lover of hers. And as for him, the wily Duchess
vowed to tire him out. He should have nothing of her beyond the little
concessions snatched in the course of contests that she could stop
at her pleasure. She had so pretty an art of revoking the grant
of yesterday, she was so much in earnest in her purpose to remain
technically virtuous, that she felt that there was not the slightest
danger for her in preliminaries fraught with peril for a woman less sure
of her self-command. After all, the Duchess was practically separated
from her husband; a marriage long since annulled was no great sacrifice
to make to her love.

Montriveau on his side was quite happy to win the vaguest promise, glad
once for all to sweep aside, with all scruples of conjugal fidelity, her
stock of excuses for refusing herself to his love. He had gained ground
a little, and congratulated himself. And so for a time he took unfair
advantage of the rights so hardly won. More a boy than he had ever been
in his life, he gave himself up to all the childishness that makes first
love the flower of life. He was a child again as he poured out all
his soul, all the thwarted forces that passion had given him, upon her
hands, upon the dazzling forehead that looked so pure to his eyes; upon
her fair hair; on the tufted curls where his lips were pressed. And the
Duchess, on whom his love was poured like a flood, was vanquished by
the magnetic influence of her lover's warmth; she hesitated to begin
the quarrel that must part them forever. She was more a woman than she
thought, this slight creature, in her effort to reconcile the dem