"Till dawn on Sunday," he answered, and for a minute we looked into one another's face in silence. What his thoughts were I do not know, but I struggled hard to count the hours that lay before the breaking of that dawn. But I could not; my brain was dumb of thought, and I could not. At last I caught at the one word--Sunday! and over and over again I said it as they say birds repeat a word when taught to speak. Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! and with as little understanding as they. "The King fixed the day. All through he has taken a marvellous interest in this mission of de Helville's. I trust, Mademoiselle de Narbonne, that you know I am ignorant of its purposes, entirely ignorant?" "Oh, Monseigneur!" answered I, "what do you or I matter? Or our ignorance or our knowledge either? Tell me of--of--Gaspard." Perhaps I spoke more sharply than was just, for his face hardened, and his keen eyes grew stormy. But only for an instant, and it is much to Monsieur de Commines' credit that he bore so temperately with the captiousness of a petulant girl. "I say the King was marvellously interested in de Helville's mission to Navarre," he went on quietly. "I think he knew it was his last blow for France, and that it should succeed was very near his heart. As time passed without news from de Helville he grew impatient, fretful, hotly passionate. For hours he would sit in the sunshine with not even his dogs near him, sit staring into vacancy while he mumbled his finger-tips like a dog a bone. Then in a flash, and for no cause, a storm of rage would shake him to so violent a mood that not even Coctier himself dared cross its course. Crooking his fingers he shook them in the air, cursing whatever crossed his mind, his son Charles, Rochfort, Navarre, de Helville, the Saints themselves, but chiefly Navarre and de Helville. At last, three weeks ago, he wrote again. What he said I do not know, though my seal closed the letter." "I know," said I. "It was a truly Kingly warning, and of a noble dignity. Go on, Monseigneur, if you please." "Then--I was absent in Tours that day--there came a post from the south, and for the first time I saw the depths of the King's rage. Mademoiselle, I am his servant and his friend, and I cannot speak of it. But the fierce mood was gone, and in its place there was an ice-cold, hungry, unemotional hate; an itching, craving lust for de Helville's death, infinitely more hopeless than the outbursts of his boisterous anger." "And yet he let the woman go free?" Monsieur de Commines searched my face anxiously. "You have heard of her?" "From Monsieur de Helville, at Morsigny. Monsieur de Helville had nothing to hide. How did your friend and master come to let the woman go?" "That was Francis of Paulo's doing. Louis would have--I do not know what he would have done. But the friar stood over him, just these two alone, and the King, falling back into one of his dour, silent moods, gave way."