"Oh, you don't love her!" cried the other, passionately. "You never did. You don't know what it means to love, or you'd not talk like this. My God! if she had been my affianced wife and this had happened, I should have killed the man - killed him! Do you hear me? But you... Oh, you, you come out here and smoke, and take the air, and talk of her as another man's leavings. I wonder I didn't strike you for the word."
He tore his arm from the other's grip, and looked almost as if he would strike him now.
"You should have done it," said André-Louis. "It's in your part."
With an imprecation Léandre turned on his heel to go. André-Louis arrested his departure.
"A moment, my friend. Test me by yourself. Would you marry her now?"
"Would I?" The young man's eyes blazed with passion. "Would I? Let her say that she will marry me, and I am her slave."
"Slave is the right word—a slave in hell."
"It would never be hell to me where she was, whatever she had done. I love her, man, I am not like you. I love her, do you hear me?"
"I have known, it for some time," said André-Louis. "Though I didn't suspect your attack of the disease to be quite so violent. Well, God knows I loved her, too, quite enough to share your thirst for killing. For myself, the blue blood of La Tour d'Azyr would hardly quench this thirst. I should like to add to it the dirty fluid that flows in the veins of the unspeakable Binet."
For a second his emotion had been out of hand, and he revealed to Léandre in the mordant tone of those last words something of the fires that burned under his icy exterior. The young man caught him by the hand.
"I knew you were acting," said he. "You feel—you feel as I do."
"Behold us, fellows in viciousness. I have betrayed myself,
