Page:Stanley Weyman--Count Hannibal.djvu/233

Rh have spoken now, if he had not caught her look of affright; strange as it sounds, that look, which of all things should have silenced him and warned him that the time was not yet, stung him out of patience. Suddenly the man in him carried him away.

“You still fear me, then?” he said, in a voice hoarse and unnatural. “Is it for what I do or for what I leave undone that you hate me, Madame? Tell me, I beg, for”

“For neither!” she said, trembling. His eyes, hot and passionate, were on her, and the blood had mounted to his brow. “For neither! I do not hate you, Monsieur!”

“You fear me then? I am right in that.”

“I fear—that which you carry with you,” she stammered, speaking on impulse and scarcely knowing what she said.

He started, and his expression changed. “So?” he exclaimed. “So? You know what I carry, do you? And from whom? From whom,” he continued in a tone of menace, “if you please, did you get that knowledge?”

“From M. La Tribe,” she muttered. She had not meant to tell him. Why had she told him?

He nodded. “I might have known it,” he said. “I more than suspected it. Therefore I should be the more beholden to you for saving the letters. But”—he paused and laughed harshly—“it was out of no love for me you saved them. That too I know.”

She did not answer or protest; and when he had waited a moment in vain expectation of her protest, a cruel look crept into his eyes.

“Madame,” he said slowly, “do you never reflect that you may push the part you play too far? That the patience, even of the worst of men, does not endure for ever?”

“I have your word!” she answered.

“And you do not fear?”