Only once did Marguerite make allusion to that terrible time which had become the past.
They were wandering together down the chestnut alley in the beautiful garden at Richmond. It was evening, and the air was heavy with the rich odour of wet earth, of belated roses and dying mignonette. She had paused in the alley, and placed a trembling hand upon his arm, whilst raising her eyes filled with tears of tender passion up to his face.
“Percy!” she murmured, “have you forgiven me?”
“What, m’dear?”
“That awful evening in Boulogne … what that fiend demanded … his awful ‘either–or’ … I brought it all upon you … it was all my fault.”
“Nay, my dear, for that ’tis I should thank you …”
“Thank me?”
“Aye,” he said, whilst in the fast-gathering dusk she could only just perceive the sudden hardening of his face, the look of wild passion in his eyes, “but for that evening in Boulogne, but for that alternative which that devil placed before me, I might never have known how much you meant to me.”
Even the recollection of all the sorrow, the anxiety, the torturing humiliations of that night seemed completely to change him; the voice became trenchant, the hands were tightly clenched. But Marguerite drew nearer to him; her two hands were on his breast; she murmured gently:
“And now? …”
He folded her in his arms, with an agony of joy, and said earnestly:
“Now I know.”