Madame Duvarney seemed to stiffen in her chair, for what did this mean but that I was a spy? and the young lady behind them now put her handkerchief to her mouth as if to stop a word. To make light of the charges against myself was the only thing, and yet I had little heart to do so. There was that between Monsieur Doltaire and myself--a matter I shall come to by-and-bye--which well might make me apprehensive. “My sketch and my gossip with my friends,” said I, “can have little interest in France.” “My faith, the Grande Marquise will find a relish for them,” he said pointedly at me. He, the natural son of King Louis, had played the part between La Pompadour and myself in the grave matter of which I spoke. “She loves deciding knotty points of morality,” he added. “She has had chance and will enough,” said I boldly, “but what point of morality is here?” “The most vital--to you,” he rejoined, flicking his handkerchief a little, and drawling so that I could have stopped his mouth with my hand. “Shall a hostage on parole make sketches of a fort and send them to his friends, who in turn pass them on to a foolish general?” “When one party to an Article of War brutally breaks his sworn promise, shall the other be held to his?” I asked quietly. I was glad that, at this moment, the Seigneur Duvarney entered, for I could feel the air now growing colder about Madame his wife. He, at least, was a good friend; but as I glanced at him, I saw his face was troubled and his manner distant. He looked at Monsieur Doltaire a moment steadily, stooped to his wife’s hand, and then offered me his own without a word; which done, he went to where his daughter stood. She kissed him, and, as she did so, whispered something in his ear, to which he nodded assent. I knew afterwards that she had asked him to keep me to dinner with them. Presently turning to Monsieur Doltaire, he said inquiringly, “You have a squad of men outside my house, Doltaire?” Doltaire nodded in a languid way, and answered, “An escort--for Captain Moray--to the citadel.” I knew now, as he had said, that I was in the trap; that he had begun the long sport which came near to giving me the white shroud of death, as it turned white the hair upon my head ere I was thirty-two. Do I not know, the indignities, the miseries I suffered, I owed mostly to him, and that at the last he nearly robbed England of her greatest pride, the taking of New France?--For chance sometimes lets humble men like me balance the scales of fate; and I was humble enough in rank, if in spirit always something above my place. I was standing as he spoke these words, and I turned to him and said, “Monsieur, I am at your service.” “I have sometimes wished,” he said instantly, and with a courteous if ironical gesture, “that you were in my service--that is, the King’s.” I bowed as to a compliment, for I would not see the insolence, and I retorted, “Would I could offer you a company in my Virginia regiment!”