And I stood by, trembling myself; and endured this
strange kind of penance.
She signed to me at last to sit down; and she went herself, and
stood in the garden doorway with her back to me. I obeyed. I
sat down. But though I had eaten nothing since the afternoon of
the day before, I could not swallow. I fumbled with my knife,
and drank; and grew hot and angry at this farce; and then looked
through the window at the dripping bushes, and the rain and the
distant sundial--and grew cold again.
Suddenly she turned round and came to my side. 'You do not eat,'
she said.
I threw down my knife, and sprang up in a frenzy of passion.
'MON DIEU! Madame,' I cried, 'do you think that I have NO
heart?'
And then in a moment I knew what I had done, what a folly I had
committed. For in a moment she was on her knees on the floor,
clasping my knees, pressing her wet cheeks to my rough clothes,
crying to me for mercy--for life! life! his life! Oh, it was
horrible! It was horrible to hear her gasping voice, to see her
fair hair falling over my mud-stained boots, to mark her slender
little form convulsed with sobs, to feel that it was a woman, a
gentlewoman, who thus abased herself at my feet!
'Oh, Madame! Madame!' I cried in my pain, 'I beg you to rise.
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