Lent! I mean you no harm. I am a fugitive. I am pursued."
This was no considered speech. There had been no preparing of words; I
had uttered them mechanically almost--perhaps
by inspiration, for they were surely the best
calculated to enlist this lady's sympathy. And so far as went the words
themselves, they were rigorously
true. With eyes wide open still, she confronted
me, and I now observed that she was not so tall as from below I had
imagined. She was, in fact, of a short stature
rather, but of proportions so exquisite that she conveyed an
impression of
some height. In her hand she held a taper by whose light she had
been surveying herself in her mirror at the moment of my advent. Her
unbound hair of brown fell
like a mantle
about her shoulders, and this fact it was drew me to notice that she was
in her night-rail, and that this room to which I had penetrated was her
chamber. "Who are you?" she asked breathlessly,
as though in such a pass my identity were a thing that signified. I had
almost
answered her, as I had answered the troopers at Mirepoix, that I was
Lesperon. Then, bethinking me that there was no need for such
equivocation here,
I was on the point of giving her my name. But noting my hesitation, and
misconstruing it, she forestalled me. "I understand,
monsieur," said she more composedly. "And you need have no fear. You are
among friends." Her eyes had travelled over my sodden clothes,
the haggard pallor of my face, and the blood that
stained my doublet from the shoulder downward.
>From all this she had drawn her conclusions that
I was a hunted rebel. She drew me into the room, and, closing the
window, she dragged the
heavy curtain across it, thereby giving me a proof of confidence that
smote me hard--impostor that I was.
"I crave your pardon, mademoiselle, for having startled you by the rude
manner of my coming," said I, and never in my life had I felt less
at ease than then. "But I was exhausted and desperate. I am wounded, I
have ridden hard, and I swam the river." The latter piece of information
was vastly unnecessary, seeing that the water from my clothes was form
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