While this conversation was going on a group of middle-aged gentlemen had been moving down the avenue that led to the Pond of Diana. These were the Baron de la Hunaudaye, Monsieur de Marillac, Monsieur de Barbanchois, Monsieur de la Ferte, and Monsieur de Vauguyon. They had been taking a peaceful interest in the spectacle afforded them, had been comparing it with similar festivities that they recalled in the days of their youth, and had been enjoying themselves tranquilly enough. Perceiving a group of young men apparently engaged in animated discussion, the elders quickened their pace a little to join the party and learn the cause of its animation. When they arrived Æsop was speaking. "Something extraordinary is going on here to-night, Monsieur de Navailles. The king is preoccupied. The guard is doubled, but no one knows why, not even these gentlemen. But I know, Æsop the Wise." "What do you know?" asked Navailles. Æsop looked at him mockingly. "You would never guess it if you guessed for a thousand years. It has nothing to do with plots or politics, with foreign intrigues or domestic difficulties--" Oriol thirsted for information. "What is it for, then?" Æsop answered, gravely, with an amazing question: "Gentlemen, do you believe in ghosts?" And the gravity of his voice and the strangeness of his question forced his hearers, surprised and uneasy, in spite of themselves, to laugh disdainfully. Æsop accepted their laughter composedly. "Of course not. No one believes in ghosts at noonday, on the crowded street, though perhaps some do at midnight when the world is over-still. But here, to-night, in all this glitter and crowd and noise and color, the king is perturbed and the guards are doubled because of a ghost--the ghost of a man who has been dead these seventeen years." The Baron de la Hunaudaye, bluff old soldier of the brave days of the dawning reign, was interested in the hunchback's words. "Of whom do you speak?" he asked. Æsop turned to the new-comers, and addressed them more respectfully than he had been addressing the partisans of Gonzague: "I speak of a gallant gentleman--young, brave, beautiful, well-beloved. I speak to men who knew him. To you, Monsieur de la Hunaudaye, who would now be lying under Flemish earth if his sword had not slain your assailant; to you, Monsieur de Marillac, whose daughter took the veil for love of him; to you, Monsieur de Barbanchois, who fortified against him the dwelling of your lady love; to you, Monsieur de la Ferte, who lost to him one evening your Castle of Senneterre; to you, Monsieur de Vauguyon, whose shoulder should still remember the stroke of his sword." As Æsop spoke, he addressed in turn each of the elder men, and as he spoke recognition of his meaning showed itself in the face of each man whom he addressed. Hunaudaye nodded. "Louis de Nevers," he said, solemnly.