I fumbled with my knife, and drank; and grew hot and angry at this farce; and then looked through the window at the dripping bushes, and the rain and the distant sundial--and grew cold again.
Suddenly she turned round and came to my side.

'You do not eat,' she said.
I threw down my knife, and sprang up in a frenzy of passion.

'MON DIEU! Madame,' I cried, 'do you think that I have NO heart ?' And then in a moment I knew what I had done, what a folly I had committed.

For in a moment she was on her knees on the floor, clasping my knees, pressing her wet cheeks to my rough clothes, crying to me for mercy--for life! life! his life! Oh, it was horrible! It was horrible to hear her gasping voice, to see her fair hair falling over my mud-stained boots, to mark her slender little form convulsed with sobs, to feel that it was a woman, a gentlewoman, who thus abased herself at my feet! 'Oh, Madame! Madame!' I cried in my pain, 'I beg you to rise.

Rise, or I must go!' 'His life! only his life!' she moaned passionately.