"It is only the old trouble. Monsieur has been muttering again, I suppose, and this, with the fact that Bussy d'Amboise keeps so quiet outside of Paris, has led the King to fear that Monsieur has planned to escape to the country. At least, it has been ordered that every member of the Duke's household, who does not have to attend at his retiring, must leave the palace at night; and Messieurs de l'Archant, De Losses, and the other captains, have received orders from the King that, if Monsieur attempts to go out after dark, he must be stopped. Suppose it becomes my duty to stop him? That will be pleasant, will it not? To make it worse, I am devoted to a certain damsel who is devoted to Queen Marguerite, who is devoted to Monsieur, her brother. And here I am inviting misfortune, too, by drinking wine on the first Friday in Lent. I ought to have followed the example of the King, who has been doing penance all day in the chapel of the Hotel de Bourbon." "Let us hope that the King will be rewarded for his penance by the submission of Monsieur. I, for one, hope that if Monsieur attempts to get away, he will run across some Scotchman of the Guard who will not scruple to impede a prince of France. For if he should lead a Huguenot army against the King, I, as one of the Guards, might be called on to oppose my fellow-Protestants." "Oh, the Duke does not wish to join the Huguenots. All he desires is to go to the Netherlands, where a throne awaits him if he will do a little fighting for it." "I fear he would rather revenge himself on the King for what he has had to endure at court." Presently Malerain left to go on duty at the Louvre, and soon I followed, to take up my station in sight of the window where Mlle. d'Arency slept. The night, which had set in, was very dark, and gusts of cold wind came up from the Seine. The place where, in my infatuation and affectation, I kept my lover's watch, was quite deserted. The Louvre loomed up gigantic before me, the lights gleaming feebly in a few of its many windows, serving less to relieve its sombre aspect than to suggest unknown, and, perhaps, sinister doings within. I laugh at myself now for having maintained those vigils by night beneath a court lady's window; but you will presently see that, but for this boyish folly, my body would have been sleeping in its grave these many years past, and I should have never come to my greatest happiness. Suddenly my attention was attracted to another window than that on which I had fixed my gaze. This other window appertained to the apartments of the King's sister, Queen Marguerite, and what caused me to transfer my attention to it was the noise of its being opened. Then a head was thrust out of it,--the small and graceful head of Marguerite herself. She looked down at the moat beneath, and in either direction, and apparently saw no one, I being quite in shadow; then she drew her head in.