Read "Under the Red Robe" by Stanley J. Weyman online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It had come, and I saw no way of escape. The sergeant was between us and I could not strike him. And I found no words. A score of times I had thought with shrinking how I should reveal my secret to Mademoiselle -- what I should say, and how she would take it; but in my mind it had been always a voluntary act, this disclosure, it had been always I who unmasked myself and she who listened -- alone; and in this voluntariness and this privacy there had been something which took from the shame of anticipation. But here -- here was no voluntary act on my part, no privacy, nothing but shame. And I stood mute, convicted, speechless, under her eyes -- like the thing I was.
Yet if anything could have braced me it was Mademoiselle's voice when she answered him.