A rueful grin spread over his saturnine countenance. Castlemaine and Stewart had been overmuch for him this morning in their division: united, against a new rival—no, the thought was beyond the pale of contemplation! Once outside, in the great corridor, filled already with evening gloom, Enguerrand paused:— “Bid the Lord Constable come and crack a bottle with us…!” The boy flung back his head and breathed sharply, through dilated nostrils, as if scenting ecstasy. His moment,—so long brooded upon, desired with such acrid ardour,—was it at last within his grasp? His hand went up to his breast with that gesture that had attracted the King’s notice. Aye, there it lay over his heart, the tiny phial of French Joan! Day and night he felt it, burning, biting into his soul; day and night he heard it whispering, urging, at once tormenting and delighting. Since that horrible hour in the Temple Gardens, it was all he had left to look for in the world. His life, shamed in his own eyes, was a worthless thing. That other life once swept away, nothing would matter that could befall him, be it death or disgrace. He went to sleep every night holding the phial against his heart.… His Vengeance, dark and beautiful…! as the lover holds his lady’s guerdon. The moment, was it actually drawing at hand when he was to kiss her on the lips? He gave a sudden laugh—secret-sounding yet triumphant, the abandoned laugh of the madman over his obsession—which startled a sleeping page at the end of the passage as with a sense of terror in the air, and he set off running on his errand, past the astonished servants. * * * * * When he reached the Lord Constable’s Whitehall apartment, by the Holbein gateway, his lordship was still sitting at his table in the dusk, apparently absorbed in some deep revery; so deep indeed that he stared at Enguerrand with unseeing eyes. The white-haired servant had twice to repeat the announcement: “The King’s page, my lord, with a command from his Majesty,” before his master roused himself to attention. Then the Lord Constable turned his fine head questioningly toward the messenger. Enguerrand bowed low, tasting, in a kind of inner intoxication, the full sense of his own irony:— “His Majesty bids you to supper, my lord, to crack—these are his Majesty’s own words—a bottle of Rhenish, as in the old days of Flanders. His Majesty is melancholy and—commands that you come and be melancholy with him.” The faintest shadow of a smile passed over the grave, listening countenance. Any one who once came under the gaze of those brilliant, haunting eyes of the Lord Constable’s could well conceive that such an order was of easy obedience. He sat in melancholy, as his royal master sat in tedium: hence the subtle pleasantry of ‘my Merry Rockhurst.’ “Thank you, Vidame,” said he, half rising, with a formal inclination of the head. “Inform his Majesty, if you please, that I attend instantly.”