Mauprat
"Yes, I love you! Yes, I love you!"
"Well, then," she said, distractedly, and in a caressing tone, "let us love each other and escape together."
"Yes; let us escape," I answered. "I loathe this house, and I loathe my uncles. I have long wanted to escape. And yet I shall only be hanged, you know."
"They won't hang you," she rejoined with a laugh; "my betrothed is a lieutenant-general."
"Your betrothed!" I cried, in a fresh fit of jealousy more violent than the first. "You are going to be married?"
"And why not?" she replied, watching me attentively.
I turned pale and clinched my teeth.
"In that case, . . ." I said, trying to carry her off in my arms.
"In that case," she answered, giving me a little tap on the cheek, "I see that you are jealous; but his must be a peculiar jealousy who at ten o'clock yearns for his mistress, only to hand her over at midnight to eight drunken men who will return her to him on the morrow as foul as the mud on the roads."
"Ah, you are right!" I exclaimed. "Go, then; go. I would defend you to the last drop of my blood; but I should be vanquished by numbers, and I should die with the knowledge that you were left to them. How horrible! I shudder to think of it. Come—you must go."
"Yes! yes, my angel!" she cried, kissing me passionately on the cheek.
These caresses, the first a woman had given me since my childhood, recalled, I know not how or why, my mother's last kiss, and, instead of pleasure, caused me
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