"Ah, Félix," she said, "if you really pitied me, you would get him out of Paris!" And she fell to weeping as if her heart would break. I had no skill to comfort her. I bent my head before her, silent. At length she sobbed out: "It boots little for us to quarrel over what you shall say to M. de Mar, when we know not that you will ever speak to him again. And it was all my fault." "Mademoiselle, it was the fault of my hasty tongue." But she shook her head. "I maintained that to you, but it was not true. Mayenne had something in his mind before. A general holds his schemes so dear and lives so cheap. But I will do my utmost, Félix, lad. It is not long to daylight now. I will go to François de Brie and we'll believe I shall prevail." She took up her candle and said good night to me very gently and quietly, and gave me her hand to kiss. She opened the door,--with my fettered wrists I could not do the office for her,--and on the threshold turned to smile on me, wistfully, hopefully. In the next second, with a gasp that was half a cry, she blew out the light and pushed the door shut again. XV _My Lord Mayenne._ I knew she was shutting the door by the click of the latch; in the next second I made the discovery that she was still on my side of it. "What--" I was beginning, when she laid her hand over my mouth. A line of light showed through the crack. She had not quite closed the door on account of the noise of the latch. She tried again; again it rattled and she desisted. I heard her fluttered breathing and I heard something else--a rapid, heavy tread in the corridor without. Into the council-room came a man carrying a lighted taper. It was Mayenne. Mademoiselle, with a whispered "God save us!" sank in a heap at my feet. I bent over her to find if she had swooned, when she seized my hand in a sharp grip that told me plain as words to be quiet. Mayenne was yawning; he had a rumpled and dishevelled look like one just roused from sleep. He crossed over to the table, lighted the three-branched candlestick standing there, and seated himself with his back to us, pulling about some papers. I hardly dared glance at him, for fear my eyes should draw his; the crack of our door seemed to call aloud to him to mark it; but the candle-light scarcely pierced the shadows of the long room. More quick footsteps in the corridor. Mayenne hitched his chair about, sidewise to the table and to us, facing the outer door. A tall man in black entered, saluting the general from the threshold. "So you have come back?" spoke the duke in his even tones. It was impossible to tell whether the words were a welcome or a sentence. "Yes," answered the other, in a voice as noncommittal as Mayenne's own. He shut the door after him and walked over to the table. "And how goes it?" "Badly." The newcomer threw his hat aside and sat down without waiting for an invitation. "What! Badly, sirrah!" Mayenne exclaimed sharply. "You come to me with that report?"