The last I saw of him was a bowed, half-crouched figure, a grey-pale face looking out from between bent shoulders, and a lean hand shaken shrewishly in the air. I was to remember whom I served! Did he mean God or himself? For all his assumption of servile religiosity, I doubted if Louis set even the seat of the Almighty higher than the throne of France. CHAPTER XVII SOUTH FROM PLESSIS Monseigneur made no comment until we were in the freshness of the open air; then he drew a long breath as if a strain had been relaxed. "It might have been worse. Come, now, that I may fill your purse; you and Martin must leave Plessis to-night." "But, Monseigneur," I protested, "this is not at all what I desired." "What you desired! Who comes to Plessis to do what he desires? And remember this, my friend, there is no turning back from the King's plough. But to tell you the truth, it is not what I desired for you, not exactly what I had in my mind for you, and yet I was a true prophet. All is as the King wills. Keep that truth in your head, walk at all times by its light, and your ten days in the rat-trap will not have been wasted." I made no reply, and we turned the angle of the royal block in silence. In silence, too, we crossed the court to his lodgings; but with his hand upon the latch, Monsieur de Commines, with a gayer note in his voice, repeated my complaint. "Not all you desired? Perhaps it is; perhaps it is even more than your imagination groped after. The petulance of ignorant youth starts like a shying horse at the first obstacle, and cries: I do not like the road. It is the method that troubles me, not the end. The end!" and the last of the cloud upon his face dissolved in merriment. "I think I would play the end of the game myself if I were five-and-twenty." "But to be a thief, an abductor of children----" "Does that choke you? Then why did you not say No! to the King?" "There was a glamour about him," I began. "Did I not tell you he had many moods? He can make any man love him--for the moment--when that is his pleasure or his profit. Besides, you over-state the case; there is only one child, and he a very little one." "It is theft, all the same." "Pooh! We are all thieves in court when a theft profits. A reputation, an office, a title, a province, it is all a question of degree. What? If I am His Majesty's ambassador at Cologne or Rome--with credentials, mind you!--is it not that I may steal an advantage? The greater the theft, the greater the honour--if only the theft be successful! There you have the world's diplomacy in a sentence. We lie and thieve abroad for the good of our country. Who are you, friend Gaspard, that you should be more scrupulous than I?" "But what kind of a household shall I find at--at----?" "Where you are going? Charming, charming; especially if, as I imagine, it is the frank abandonment of country life without etiquette or punctilio."