Page:Hope-indiscretions of duchess.djvu/174

162 moment, as it lay gleaming and glittering on the wooden table in the bare inn parlor. Then he stepped up to the table, but at the moment I cried:

“You won’t steal her away before—before”

“Before we fight? I will not, on my honor.” He paused and added: “For there is one thing I want more even than her.”

I could guess what that was.

And then he put out his hand, took up the necklace, and thrust it carelessly into the pocket of his coat. And looking across the room, I saw the inn-keeper, Jacques Bontet, standing in the doorway and staring with all his eyes at the spot on the table where the glittering thing had for a moment lain; and as the fellow set down the wine he had brought for the duke, I swear that he trembled as a man who has seen a ghost; for he spilled some of the wine and chinked the bottle against the glass. But while I stared at him, the duke lifted his glass and bowed to me, saying, with a smile and as though he jested in some phrase of extravagant friendship for me:

“May nothing less than death part you and me?”

And I drank the toast with him, saying “Amen.”