"I cannot speak with you more at present, Ignati," he said, "nor, perhaps, during the whole day, for there is business of life and death before me; but come to me while I am rising to-morrow, and only tell me in the mean time where our poor Logères is, for I know not what convent you mean." "He is in the rector's court," replied the boy, "close by the convent of the Black Penitents, in the Rue St. Denis." "By my faith!" exclaimed the Duke in no slight surprise, "I have been there this very day myself, and there the Queen-mother has made her abode for the last ten days. She must be deceiving me; and yet, perhaps, the mighty matters that occupied her mind when I saw her might have made her forget all other things. However, Logères shall not be long so fettered. Come to me to-morrow, Ignati; come to me to-morrow, as I am rising; and in the mean time, if you can find some means of giving the Count intimation that he is not forgotten, it were all the better." "I will try, my Lord," replied the boy. And the Duke hurried on to welcome his new guests, making them sit down at table with him, and covering them with every sort of honour and distinction. CHAP. XIII. In our dealings with each other there is nothing which we so much miscalculate as the ever varying value of time, and indeed it is but too natural to look upon it as it seems to us, and not as it seems to others. The slow idler on whose head it hangs heavy, holds the man of business by the button, and remorselessly robs him on the king's highway of a thing ten times more valuable than the purse that would hang him if he took it. The man of action and of business whose days seem but moments, forgets in his dealing with the long expecting applicant, and the weary petitioner, that to them each moment is far longer than his day. The hours, not one minute of which were unfilled to the Duke of Guise, passed slowly over the head of Charles of Montsoreau, and it seemed as if the brief gleam of happiness which had come across his path had but tended to make the long solitary moments seem longer and more dreary; in fact, to give full and painful effect to solitude and want of liberty, and yet he would not have lost that gleam for all the world. He thought of it, he dwelt upon it, he called to mind each and every particular; and, though it was crossed, as the memory of all such brief meetings are, with the recollection of a thousand things which he could have wished to have said, but which he had forgotten, and also by many a speculation of a painful kind concerning the visit of the Duke of Guise to the very place in which he was confined, without the slightest effort being made for his liberation, yet it was a consolation and a happiness and a joy to him--one of those blessings which have been stamped by the past with the irrevocable seal of enjoyment, which are our own, the unalienable jewels of our fate, held for ever in the treasury of memory.