“And is it too late—­to undo it?”

“It is too late.”  A sob choked her voice.

Tears—­tears incredible, unnatural—­welled from under Count Hannibal’s closed eyelids, and rolled sluggishly down his harsh cheek to the edge of his beard.

“I would have gone,” he muttered.  “If you had spoken, I would have spared you this.”

“I know,” she answered unsteadily; “the men told me.”

“And yet—­”

“It was just.  And you are my husband,” she replied.  “More, I am the captive of your sword, and as you spared me in your strength, my lord, I spared you in your weakness.”

“Mon Dieu!  Mon Dieu, Madame!” he cried, “at what a cost!”

And that arrested, that touched her in the depths of her grief and her horror; even while the gibbet on the causeway, which had burned itself into her eyeballs, hung before her.  For she knew that it was the cost to her he was counting.  She knew that for himself he had ever held life cheap, that he could have seen Tignonville suffer without a qualm.  And the thoughtfulness for her, the value he placed on a thing—­even on a rival’s life—­because its was dear to her, touched her home, moved her as few things could have moved her at that moment.  She saw it of a piece with all that had gone before, with all that had passed between them, since that fatal Sunday in Paris.  But she made no sign.  More than she had said she would not say; words of love, even of reconciliation, had no place on her lips while he whom she had sacrificed awaited his burial.

And meantime the man beside her lay and found it incredible.  “It was just,” she had said.  And he knew it; Tignonville’s folly—­that and that only had led them into the snare and caused his own capture.  But what had justice to do with the things of this world?  In his experience, the strong hand—­that was justice, in France; and possession—­that was law.  By the strong hand he had taken her, and by the strong hand she might have freed herself.

And she had not.  There was the incredible thing.  She had chosen instead to do justice!  It passed belief.  Opening his eyes on a silence which had lasted some minutes, a silence rendered more solemn by the lapping water without, Tavannes saw her kneeling in the dusk of the chamber, her head bowed over his couch, her face hidden in her hands.  He knew that she prayed, and feebly he deemed the whole a dream.  No scene akin to it had had place in his life; and, weakened and in pain, he prayed that the vision might last for ever, that he might never awake.

But by-and-by, wrestling with the dread thought of what she had done, and the horror which would return upon her by fits and spasms, she flung out a hand, and it fell on him.  He started, and the movement, jarring the broken limb, wrung from him a cry of pain.  She looked up and was going to speak, when a scuffling of feet under the gateway arch, and a confused sound of several voices raised at once, arrested the words on her lips.  She rose to her feet and listened.  Dimly he could see her face through the dusk.  Her eyes were on the door, and she breathed quickly.