His face was a picture of blank despair, and his voice was low and hoarse.

'You must know whom she means,' he added, when Michel did not at once reply.
'Yes; I know whom she means.' 'Who is it then, M.Voss ?' 'It is George, of course,' replied the innkeeper.
'I did not know,' said poor Adrian Urmand.
'She never spoke a dozen words to any other man in her life, and as for him, she has hardly seen him for the last eighteen months.

He has come over and said something to her, like a traitor,--has reminded her of some childish promise, some old vow, something said when they were children, and meaning nothing; and so he has frightened her.' 'I was never told that there was anything between them,' said Urmand, beginning to think that it would become him to be indignant.
'There was nothing to tell,--literally nothing.' 'They must have been writing to each other.' 'Never a line; on my word as a man.

It was just as I tell you.
When George went from home, there had been some fooling, as I thought, between them; and I was glad that he should go.

I didn't think it meant anything, or ever would.' As Michel Voss said this, there did occur to him an idea that perhaps, after all, he had been wrong to interfere in the first instance,--that there had then been no really valid reason why George should not have married Marie Bromar; but that did not in the least influence his judgment as to what it might be expedient to do now.