She stood, as he spoke, in the ruined gateway, a walled grass-plot behind her, and at her feet the stream, the smiling valley, the alders, and the little camp.  The sky was cloudless, the scene drowsy with the stillness of an August afternoon.  But his words went home so truly that the sunlit landscape before the eyes added one more horror to the picture he called up before the mind.

The Countess turned white and sick.  “Are you sure?” she whispered at last.

“Quite sure.”

“Ah, God!” she cried, “are we never to have peace?” And turning from the valley, she walked some distance into the grass court, and stood.  After a time, she turned to him; he had followed her doggedly, pace for pace.  “What do you want me to do?” she cried, despair in her voice.  “What can I do?”

“Were the letters he bears destroyed—­”

“The letters?”

“Yes, were the letters destroyed,” La Tribe answered relentlessly, “he could do nothing!  Nothing!  Without that authority the magistrates of Angers would not move.  He could do nothing.  And men and women and children—­men and women and children whose blood will otherwise cry for vengeance, perhaps for vengeance on us who might have saved them—­will live!  Will live!” he repeated, with a softening eye.  And with an all-embracing gesture he seemed to call to witness the open heavens, the sunshine and the summer breeze which wrapped them round.  “Will live!”

She drew a deep breath.  “And you have brought me here,” she said, “to ask me to do this?”

“I was sent here to ask you to do this.”

“Why me?  Why me?” she wailed, and she held out her open hands to him, her face wan and colourless.  “You come to me, a woman!  Why to me?”

“You are his wife!”

“And he is my husband!”

“Therefore he trusts you,” was the unyielding, the pitiless answer.  “You, and you alone, have the opportunity of doing this.”

She gazed at him in astonishment.  “And it is you who say that?” she faltered, after a pause.  “You who made us one, who now bid me betray him, whom I have sworn to love?  To ruin him whom I have sworn to honour?”

“I do!” he answered solemnly.  “On my head be the guilt, and on yours the merit.”

“Nay, but—­” she cried quickly, and her eyes glittered with passion—­“do you take both guilt and merit!  You are a man,” she continued, her words coming quickly in her excitement, “he is but a man!  Why do you not call him aside, trick him apart on some pretence or other, and when there are but you two, man to man, wrench the warrant from him?  Staking your life against his, with all those lives for prize?  And save them or perish?  Why I, even I, a woman, could find it in my heart to do that, were he not my husband!  Surely you, you who are a man, and young—­”