Half-an-hour later, when I quitted the presence of the Queen, it was as one to whom the world was opening afresh, and in that brief interval I had felt and begun to understand the subtle intellect of Catherine, of the existence of which few as yet were aware. In regard to the mission with which I was entrusted I am pledged to preserve silence. The people concerned in it are dead, and when I follow them the secret will go with me. Let it suffice for me to say that my task was such that a man of honour could accept, and that if I failed the preservation of my skin was my own affair, for help I would get from none. Hidden in the inner pocket of my vest was a dispatch to Montluc, the King's lieutenant in the South. In my hand I openly bore a letter, sealed with the _palle_ of the Medici, and addressed in the Queen's own writing to the King. It was to be the means of my freeing the gates of Paris if difficulty arose, and how it did so I shall presently show. I found my friends awaiting me, and Le Brusquet asked: "Well, have you come forth a made man?" "Monsieur, I will answer you that," I said with assumed gravity, "if you will tell me who betrayed me to the Queen." I looked from one to the other, and they both laughed. "Behold the traitor, then!" And Le Brusquet pointed with his finger at me. "I?" "Yes, you!--as if you had called it from the housetops. _Mon ami_, did ever hear of a bourgeois handling sword as you, or bearing arms _un coq d'or griffe de sable, en champ d'azur_? Those arms are on your wine-cups--if they exist still--they are on the hilt of the sword you lent me." "_Morbleu_!" "But that is not all. In the gay, red days, when Lorgnac here and I had all the world before us, we were of the College of Cambrai. It is true we entered as you left; but we knew you, and when all Paris was full of your name Lorgnac and I, and others whom you knew not, aped the fall of your cloak, the droop of your plume, the tilt of your sword. Those days are gone, and until last night you, I thought, were gone with them." "Monsieur!" "Listen! There is more yet. I but told the Queen of the arms you bore. She recognised them at once." "That is not strange; the Vidame d'Orrain is in Paris!" "True! But she remembered your history--every detail of it. It was long ago, and many things have happened, and the Seine there has rolled much water under its bridges since then, but she had forgotten nothing. My friend, they who say the Medicis ever forgets are fools--blind in their folly. And so, for the sake of last night, and a little for the days that have gone, we will see pretty things yet, God willing! Eh, De Lorgnac?" "I for one look forward to the day when a brave man will come to his own," replied the other, and their kindness touched me to the quick.