"Let me tell you, my darling--for I tell you everything," said Valerie
--"I was saving him up for a husband.--The promises I have made to
that man!--Oh, long before I knew you," said she, in reply to a
movement from Wenceslas. "And those promises, of which he avails
himself to plague me, oblige me to get married almost secretly; for if
he should hear that I am marrying Crevel, he is the sort of man that
--that would kill me."
"Oh, as to that!" said Steinbock, with a scornful expression, which
conveyed that such a danger was small indeed for a woman beloved by a
Pole.
And in the matter of valor there is no brag or bravado in a Pole, so
thoroughly and seriously brave are they all.
"And that idiot Crevel," she went on, "who wants to make a great
display and indulge his taste for inexpensive magnificence in honor of
the wedding, places me in difficulties from which I see no escape."
Could Valerie confess to this man, whom she adored, that since the
discomfiture of Baron Hulot, this Baron Henri Montes had inherited the
privilege of calling on her at all hours of the day or night; and
that, notwithstanding her cleverness, she was still puzzled to find a
cause of quarrel in which the Brazilian might seem to be solely in the
wrong? She knew the Baron's almost savage temper--not unlike Lisbeth's
--too well not to quake as she thought of this Othello of Rio de
Janeiro.
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