"'Tis now forty-five years," he said to himself, "since he came here. A lifetime! Of what use for him to regain his liberty? He said once to me, when first I was brought to this room, that this awful place was his only home. Heaven grant, if they release him, that he may not find it to be so!" He watched Bluet's manner when he removed the remains of their next meal--which meals had gradually, as month followed month, become more sparse and meagre, possibly because De Launey had now come to suppose that neither of them would ever be able to publish to anyone outside those gloomy walls the story of his neglect and parsimony, to call it by no other name--and as he did so he noticed that this good-natured fellow seemed even kinder to the old man than ever. "_Mon Dieu!_" he began now, with his usual exclamation, varied only occasionally with his _ma foi_--"_mon Dieu_, 'tis cold, Monsieur le Marquis. Yet, I'll warrant me, there are blazing fires in many a happy home in France. _Par exemple_, now, in the Château de Chevagny I will dare to say they keep good fires for monsieur." The old man looked up at him with a startled, hurt look; then he said softly: "Bluet, you have always been good and kind to me. In the ten years you have been here I have come to look on you as a friend. Yet, when you recall needlessly to me my--my long-vanished home--that I shall never see more--you hurt, you wound me." "Ah! _avec ça!_" said Bluet, "I'll wager you see that home again yet. Or, perhaps--_mon Dieu!_ why not?--the Hôtel de Chevagny in Paris itself. Monsieur le Marquis is not to suppose we shall entertain him for ever; no, no! Neither is he to imagine that because he has dwelt with us so long--it is a little long, I concede--he shall never leave us." The old man regarded him fixedly for a moment, then he sighed and gave a true French shrug to his shoulders. "If," he exclaimed, in his gentle, well-bred voice, the aristocratic tones of which he had never lost--"if it pleases you to wound me, Bluet, you must do so. Yet I know not why. We have always been such good friends." "Cease," said Bertie to the turnkey in a whisper. "Why play with an old man thus?" "It is no play," Bluet replied in the same whisper, only that his was a husky, vinous one. "He is remembered. D'Argenson comes to-morrow night. He will go before him. It may be that on the next day he will be free. Break it to him if you can." "You are certain of this?" Bertie asked, intensely startled and interested now. "Certain? I thought you told me long ago that no one knew who the judges would call before them."