hideous
revelation.

"In God's name, who are you?" she cried in accents that bespoke internal
agony.

"Already you have guessed it, Mademoiselle," I answered, and I would
have added that which should have brought comfort to her distraught
mind, when--

"You!" she gasped in a voice of profound horror. "You! You, the Judas
who has sold my father to the Cardinal for a paltry share in our
estates. And I believed that mask of yours to hide the face of St.
Auban!"

Her words froze me into a stony mass of insensibility. There was no
logic in my attitude; I see it now. Appearances were all against me, and
her belief no more than justified. I overlooked all this, and instead of
saving time by recounting how I came to be there and thus delivering her
from the anguish that was torturing her, I stood, dumb and cruel, cut to
the quick by her scorn and her suspicions that I was capable of such a
thing as she imputed, and listening to the dictates of an empty pride
that prompted me to make her pay full penalty.

"Oh, God pity me!" she wailed. "Have you naught to say?"

Still I maintained my mad, resentful silence. And presently, as one who
muses--

"You!" she said again. "You, whom I--" She stopped short. "Oh! The shame
of it!" she moaned.

Reason at last came uppermost, and as in my mind I completed her broken
sentence, my heart gave a great throb and I was thawed to a gentler
purpose.

"Mademoiselle!" I exclaimed.

But even as I spoke, she turned, and sweeping aside her gown that it
might not touch me, she moved rapidly towards the steps we had just
descended. Full of remorse, I sprang after her.

"Mademoiselle! Hear me," I cried, and put forth my hand to stay her.
Thereat she wheeled round and faced me, a blaze of fury in her grey
eyes.

"Dare not to touch me," she panted. "You thief, you hound!"

I recoiled, and, like one turned to stone, I stood and watched her mount
the steps, my feelings swaying violently between anger and sorrow. Then
my eye fell upon Montresor standing on the topmost step, and on his face
there was a sneering, insolent smile which told me that he had heard the
epithets she had bestowed upon me.

Albeit I sought that day another interview with Yvonne, I did not gain
it, and so I was forced to sun myself in solitude upon the terrace. But
I cherished for my consolation that broken sentence of hers, whereby
I read that the coldness which she had evinced for me before I left
Canaples had only