She put a spoon in her empty cup and stirred as if there were coffee there. "And now you must go away, you tell me?" Her voice broke upward. She dropped the spoon and took up her handkerchief to her mouth.

"Yes."

"What did you say to her?" The question was more like an exclamation. She balled the handkerchief in her fingers.

"I told her the truth."

"Oh, you must have made a great spoil of it all! She did not accept it?"

"She accepted it well enough, Maman," he said, as gently as he could. "And still I must go away."

His mother stood up, leaning on the table. She was trembling, but she managed to say, "What have you done to her?"

"It's what I will not do to her."

"And what is that? You do not offer a… a carte blanche… not to such a lady. You would ask her to wed you."

"Ma mère, I'm afraid to ask. I'm afraid she would say yes."

She stared at him. "But of course yes. And why not?"

"Because she would go with me!" He paced across the small room. "You know that she would; she is a little heroine: she is all heart. She's never refused me any mad thing I asked, never once. And I want her—my God, I want her with me. But I will not. I will not ask her to live as I do. I was wrong to linger here, wrong to speak to her at all." He closed his eyes. "What I've said, what I've done—knowing that I had no right!" He shook his head helplessly. "You don't know this life, Maman, and neither does she. It would be exile for her, from everything she holds dear."

"And so?" his mother demanded. "Do you think I do not know exile?"

He stopped and looked around at her.

"Trevelyan," she said, more quietly. "I will tell you something, mon ange. It is you who condemn her to exile."

He gazed at her. Then he looked away blindly.

She lowered herself to the chair again. "What will the life be with this officer who cares only for her money?"

"She says they're growing to love one another."

His mother gave him a look of scorn. "You will let another man take her from you?" she asked provocatively.

"I'm not fit for her," he said, scowling at the fading gilt on a pier mirror that was older than he was.

"Chut! Your grand-père will strike us with light ning bolts! The duc de Monceaux, twenty generations in Bourgogne, and to say you are not worthy of some English girl."

He gave a reluctant laugh at her exact imitation of his grandfather's frosty tone. "How many times have I heard that? Twenty generations in Bourgogne."

"At the measured pace you are proceeding, mon fils, I will not live to see twenty one, not any place at all."