A wiser or a more selfish man would have accepted his defeat. Not so Château-Foix, and in proportion as his agitation and anxiety grew greater, so did his manner become harsher. Moreover, he was painfully aware of it. “You are mad! he exclaimed. “Can’t you see—if there is the least suspicion of foul play . . . You are compromised enough already; don’t, for God’s sake, walk further into the trap! Madame d’Espaze——” There was a dangerous glint in the Vicomte’s eye. “Pray do not think me wanting in good manners,” he interrupted slowly and with a slight air of weariness, “if I intimate—always with thanks for your interest—that I can manage my own affairs.” “In that case,” retorted Gilbert, stung to the quick, “I will leave you to do so.” He rose, inwardly more angry at his failure to get his own way than at his cousin’s insolence, and most of all, though he scarcely knew it, angry with himself for having consciously bungled a delicate task. Even then he could not check his further progress down the path of undoing. “I wonder,” he observed coldly, “that you care to compromise the King in this way.” Louis fired up immediately, and one could guess the submerged presence of a certain very intractable temper from the pose of his head as he frowned at his cousin. “Morbleu! compromise!” he began angrily; then laughed a little as he dealt a more telling riposte. “At least we try to do something, while you—you with your supine, enlightened Liancourt and La Rochefoucauld—you sit on a fence and dare not put out a finger in the storm you have called up yourselves! Mon Dieu! if I was as afraid for my precious skin as some of you are, I might think twice before I compromised the King, as you call it!” He was on his feet, with every mark of displeasure on his handsome visage, but he had hardly raised his voice. Gilbert was angry too, for the taunt against his party was grossly unfair. “We will not discuss the matter now,” he said stiffly. “It would certainly be wiser not to do so,” acquiesced the Vicomte, who had regained his composure, and he gave as he spoke a quick glance round the room. Château-Foix saw the look and smiled rather bitterly. “I understand,” he said. “One does not air one’s views in the enemy’s camp.” “Oh, if you regard us as that, Gilbert——” broke in his cousin. “I beg your pardon. Of course I did not mean it. But still . . . am I to understand that you persist in going to Madame d’Espaze’s salon to-night?” His tone was acridly cold, his manner galling in the extreme. An unbiassed observer might have thought that his young kinsman now displayed beneath it a surprising patience; indeed the latter, completely recovered from his sudden heat, looked at the Marquis with something like an amused forbearance in his glance. The next moment he had summoned up a demeanour to match his cousin’s.