Bigot’s eyes sparkled with joy.

The minister hesitated.  “No more, Madame?” he faltered.  He was tender-hearted, and Tignonville was of his people.

“No more,” she said gravely, bowing her head.  “It is not M. de Tignonville I have to thank, but Heaven’s mercy, that I do not stand here at this moment unhappy as I entered—­a woman accursed, to be pointed at while I live.  And the dead”—­she pointed solemnly through the dark casement to the shore—­“the dead lie there.”

La Tribe went.

She stood a moment in thought, and then took the keys from the rough stone window-ledge on which she had laid them when she entered.  As the cold iron touched her fingers she shuddered.  The contact awoke again the horror and misery in which she had groped, a lost thing, when she last felt that chill.

“Take them,” she said; and she gave them to Bigot.  “Until my lord can leave his couch they will remain in your charge, and you will answer for all to him.  Go, now, take the light; and in half an hour send Madame Carlat to me.”

A wave broke heavily on the causeway and ran down seething to the sea; and another and another, filling the room with rhythmical thunders.  But the voice of the sea was no longer the same in the darkness, where the Countess knelt in silence beside the bed—­knelt, her head bowed on her clasped hands, as she had knelt before, but with a mind how different, with what different thoughts!  Count Hannibal could see her head but dimly, for the light shed upwards by the spume of the sea fell only on the rafters.  But he knew she was there, and he would fain, for his heart was full, have laid his hand on her hair.

And yet he would not.  He would not, out of pride.  Instead he bit on his harsh beard, and lay looking upward to the rafters, waiting what would come.  He who had held her at his will now lay at hers, and waited.  He who had spared her life at a price now took his own a gift at her hands, and bore it.

“Afterwards, Madame de Tavannes—­”

His mind went back by some chance to those words—­the words he had neither meant nor fulfilled.  It passed from them to the marriage and the blow; to the scene in the meadow beside the river; to the last ride between La Fleche and Angers—­the ride during which he had played with her fears and hugged himself on the figure he would make on the morrow.  The figure?  Alas! of all his plans for dazzling her had come—­this!  Angers had defeated him, a priest had worsted him.  In place of releasing Tignonville after the fashion of Bayard and the Paladins, and in the teeth of snarling thousands, he had come near to releasing him after another fashion and at his own expense.  Instead of dazzling her by his mastery and winning her by his magnanimity, he lay here, owing her his life, and so weak, so broken, that the tears of childhood welled up in his eyes.

Out of the darkness a hand, cool and firm, slid into his, clasped it tightly, drew it to warm lips, carried it to a woman’s bosom.