"Why not? Whom have you? Nobody--nobody in this world but me."
She smiled faintly at the fierceness of his brief question.
"It's no one to whom you need feel any opposition, even though it's some one who can do for me what you cannot."
"What you cannot; what no man can. _Asperges me hyssopo, et mundabor_. Thou shalt purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Derek, He has purged me with hyssop, even though it has not been in the way you think. With the hyssop of what I've had to suffer He has purged me from so many things that now I see I can safely commit my cause to Him."
She looked at him in silence before she replied:
She tried to speak, but her voice failed her.
Her voice was faint, her head sank, her body trembled, but she forced the one word, "No."
"Mademoiselle has sent for me?" Bienville kissed the hand that Miss Grimston, without rising from her comfortable chair before the fire, lifted toward him. The hand-screen with which she shielded her face protected her not only from the blaze, but from his scrutiny. In the same way, the winter gloaming, with its uncertain light, nerved her against her fear of self-betrayal, giving her that assurance of being mistress of herself which she lacked when he was near.
"I did send for you. I wanted to see you. Won't you sit down?"
"I've been expecting the summons," he said, significantly, taking the seat on the other side of the hearth.
"I thought the day would come when you would be more just to me."
"I have. That's why I asked you to come."
During the brief silence before she spoke again he was able to congratulate himself on his diplomacy. He had checked his first impulse to come to her with his great news immediately on his return from Lakefield. He had seen how relatively ineffective the information would be were it to proceed bluntly from himself. He had even restrained Mrs. Bayford's enthusiasm, in order to let the intelligence filter gently through the neutral agencies of common gossip. In this way it would seem to Miss Grimston a discovery of her own, and appeal to her as an indirect corroboration of his word. He had the less scruple in taking these precautions in that he believed Diane to have justified anything he might have said of her. It was no small relief to a man of honor to know he had not been guilty of a gratuitous slander, even though it was only on a woman. He awaited Miss Grimston's next words with complacent expectancy, but when they came they surprised him.