"Your honour is above all price," he said at last in reply to
her. "But what is honour in this case of yours, in which I throw
the whole interest of my life, stake all? For I am convinced that,
losing, the book of fate will close for me. Winning, I shall begin
again, and play a part in France which men shall speak of when I
am done with all. I never had ambition for myself; for you, Alixe
Duvarney, a new spirit lives in me.... I will be honest with you.
At first I swore to cool my hot face in your bosom; and I would
have done that at any price, and yet I would have stood by that
same dishonour honourably to the end. Never in my whole life did I
put my whole heart in any--episode--of admiration: I own it, for
you to think what you will. There never was a woman whom, loving
to-day,"--he smiled--"I could not leave to-morrow with no more than
a pleasing kind of regret. Names that I ought to have recalled I
forgot; incidents were cloudy, like childish remembrances. I was
not proud of it; the peasant in me spoke against it sometimes. I
even have wished that I, half peasant, had been--"

"If only you had been all peasant, this war, this misery of
mine, had never been," she interrupted.

He nodded with an almost boyish candour. "Yes, yes, but I was half
prince also; I had been brought up, one foot in a cottage and
another in a palace. But for your misery: is it, then, misery? Need
it be so? But lift your finger and all will be well. Do you wish to
save your country? Would that be compensation? Then I will show you
the way. We have three times as many soldiers as the English, though
of poorer stuff. We could hold this place, could defeat them, if we
were united and had but two thousand men. We have fifteen thousand.
As it is now, Vaudreuil balks Montcalm, and that will ruin us in the