"It were an ill thing to wound you by so refusing it."

"Marquise," he cried, "it is as nothing to what I would do did the
occasion serve. But when this thing 'tis done; when you have had
your way with Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye, and the nuptials shall
have been celebrated, then - dare I hope - ?"

He said no more in words, but his little blue eyes had an eloquence
that left nothing to mere speech.

Their glances met, she holding him always at arm's length by that
grip upon his shoulders, a grip that was firm and nervous.

In the Seneschal of Dauphiny, as she now gazed upon him, she beheld
a very toad of a man, and the soul of her shuddered at the sight of
him combining with the thing that he suggested. But her glance was
steady and her lips maintained their smile, just as if that ugliness
of his had been invested with some abstract beauty existing only to
her gaze; a little colour crept into her cheeks, and red being the
colour of love's livery, Tressan misread its meaning.

She nodded to him across the little distance of her outstretched
arms, then smothered a laugh that drove him crazed with hope, and
breaking from him she sped swiftly, shyly it almost seemed to him,
to the door.

There she paused a moment looking back at him with a coyness that
might have become a girl of half her years, yet which her splendid
beauty saved from being unbecoming even in her.