“Monsieur de Vibrac! There can be no higher honor than to receive the surrender of a Bourbon. I confer it upon you for your services--will you have the goodness to take His Highness’ sword? It will make us quits on the score of Ponthieu--and other things.” The devilish malignity of the man stunned me. I could say nothing, but stood there like a stone. Every eye was fixed upon me; and then Achon continued, in his cold, measured voice: “Monseigneur! You look as if you thought me mad. Let me tell you that I am only paying a traitor his account. Every detail of the plan for your escape was disclosed to us by your good friend there--ask him to deny it if he can.” “It is impossible--it is an infamous lie!” exclaimed Condé, and there arose a buzz of astonishment and amaze. I stood transfixed, shaking in every limb, my coward heart almost dead within me. “Look at him!” repeated Achon, and then a figure ran out from the group behind the Princess, and Yvonne de Mailly, her eyes blazing, her voice shrill, stood before me. “Say it is a lie!” she said; “say it is a lie!” There are things the mind feels, and knows to be true, instinctively. I lifted my head and looked into the girl’s hot eyes, and read there, in that moment, what, had I not been a blind fool, I might have known a year before. And she, she as she met my gaze, saw too, and it was something that paled her to the lips, something that made her cower and shrink back from me. Her woman’s heart had told her what I was, and with a smothered cry she threw her arms up, and burst into peal after peal of mirthless laughter. CHAPTER XXII “NOTRE HOMME EST CROQUÉ” WHEN an overwhelming disaster befalls one, when the whole ship of one’s life founders hopelessly, it is perhaps decreed in mercy that the full horror of the thing cannot be realized at the moment it happens. Little by little it breaks in upon the understanding, and it is only when the mind gains strength to endure, that it has the power to realize.