We exchanged a glance as we passed, and I read enough in Richelieu’s eye to understand that it was not any delay in getting at his skin of wine that touched him, but that this order of Catherine had crossed some design which had little to do with the jests of le Brusquet or the vintage of Gascogne. We left him, apparently debating in his mind whether he should obey the commands he had received or not, and returned as we came. On entering the passage leading to Catherine’s apartments, Marcilly and I were side by side, and he put his hand on my arm with a friendly pressure, as he said, “I think we win.” Oh! Win or lose! It was all one to me now; but the touch of his hand stirred the smouldering hate in my heart toward the man who had come between me and the woman I loved. I shrank back from him, muttering something--I do not know myself what--and thankful for the gloom that hid the expression which must have passed over my features. It is a profound and awful mystery that man should carry within himself the poison that can kill his soul. Who shall fathom this strange thing? Not you nor I, my friends; but it remains true that the Almighty hand has placed side by side in our hearts the noblest aspirations and the most deadly passions. It is as if a gardener rears, with infinite pain and labor, a beautiful plant, and then grafts on to it a poisonous cutting, whose growth means death to the exquisite thing on which such labor and such care has been spent. And the poison herbs were growing apace within me now, spreading their long arms about my soul, choking, with their creeping growth, all the manly, the noble, the pure thoughts that, but for my own folly, might have made me a man fit to hold my head high among my fellows. All these thoughts did not pass through me then. They came with the after years, with memory, with shame, and a too late repentance. But at the time when I shrank back from Marcilly and followed my companions, the last of all, I was conscious only of a hideous turmoil in my soul; and I saw, with an ever-increasing dread and horror, that I had again approached the edge of that abyss from which but so short a while back I thought I had escaped, and whose dark deeps were now calling me down to them with an irresistible force. In a few paces we reached the cabinet. Bentivoglio, with suave politeness, held open the door to let us pass, and as I stepped in, the last of all, I became conscious that there was some one there. For the figure of a woman arose from a chair near the window, where she had been sitting caressing Nambu, the Barbary ape, and stood in the half-light awaiting us to advance. A second glance assured me that it was no other than Mary of Scotland, the young Queen of France herself, and with that recognition there came to me like lightning the thought that something had arisen to thwart our plans, else why should she, the secret friend of Condé, be here, and evidently expecting us?