“You would whip me, I suppose?”

“Yes,” he said quietly.  “It would do you good, Madame.  And with other women otherwise.  There are women who, if they are well frightened, will not deceive you.  And there are others who will not deceive you though they are frightened.  Madame de Tavannes is of the latter kind.”

“Wait!  Wait and see!” Madame cried in scorn.

“I am waiting.”

“Yes!  And whereas if you had come to me I could have told her that about M. de Tignonville which would have surprised her, you will go on waiting and waiting and waiting until one fine day you’ll wake up and find Madame gone, and—­”

“Then I’ll take a wife I can whip!” he answered, with a look which apprised her how far she had carried it.  “But it will not be you, sweet cousin.  For I have no whip heavy enough for your case.”

CHAPTER XXI.  SHE WOULD, AND WOULD NOT.

We noted some way back the ease with which women use one concession as a stepping-stone to a second; and the lack of magnanimity, amounting almost to unscrupulousness, which the best display in their dealings with a retiring foe.  But there are concessions which touch even a good woman’s conscience; and Madame de Tavannes, free by the tenure of a blow, and with that exception treated from hour to hour with rugged courtesy, shrank appalled before the task which confronted her.

To ignore what La Tribe had told her, to remain passive when a movement on her part might save men, women, and children from death, and a whole city from massacre—­this was a line of conduct so craven, so selfish, that from the first she knew herself incapable of it.  But to take the only other course open to her, to betray her husband and rob him of that, the loss of which might ruin him, this needed not courage only, not devotion only, but a hardness proof against reproaches as well as against punishment.  And the Countess was no fanatic.  No haze of bigotry glorified the thing she contemplated, or dressed it in colours other than its own.  Even while she acknowledged the necessity of the act and its ultimate righteousness, even while she owned the obligation which lay upon her to perform it, she saw it as he would see it, and saw herself as he would see her.

True, he had done her a great wrong; and this in the eyes of some might pass for punishment.  But he had saved her life where many had perished; and, the wrong done, he had behaved to her with fantastic generosity.  In return for which she was to ruin him?  It was not hard to imagine what he would say of her, and of the reward with which she had requited him.