"For only a short time," said the youth, with a melancholy smile, as he pressed her hand. He left her: but she stood looking after him until the last door had closed behind him. Then returning to her room, she fell upon her knees before her _prie-Dieu_, weeping bitterly, and with palpitating heart. "O _mon Dieu_, _mon Dieu_!" she prayed, "in Jesus' name, watch over him who is perhaps my brother, as well as over him who is perhaps my father! Preserve the two beings whom I love, O my God! Thou alone canst do it now." CHAPTER IX OPPORTUNITY In spite of her earnest efforts to prevent it, or rather because of those very efforts, events occurred as Madame de Castro had foreseen and dreaded. Gabriel had gone from her presence sorrowful and agitated. Diane's fever had communicated itself to him in some measure, and clouded his eyes and confused his thoughts. He passed mechanically down the stairways and along the familiar corridors of the Louvre, without paying much attention to exterior objects. Nevertheless, as he was on the point of opening the door of the great gallery, he did remember that on his return from St. Quentin it was there that he had met Mary Stuart, and through the intervention of the young queen-dauphine had succeeded in reaching the king's presence, where the first fraud and humiliation had been practised upon him. For he had not been deceived and outraged on one occasion only; several times had his enemies trampled upon his hope before its life was finally extinct. After he had first been made their dupe, he would have done well to expect similar treatment, and to have anticipated such exaggerated and cowardly interpretations of the letter of a sacred agreement. While these irritating reminiscences were coursing through his brain, he opened the door and entered the gallery. At the other end of the gallery, the corresponding door opened at the same moment. A man entered. It was Henri II.,--Henri, the author of, or at least the principal accessory in, the foul and dastardly deception which had forever withered Gabriel's heart and poisoned his life. The king came forward alone, unarmed and unattended. The offender and the offended, for the first time since the perpetration of the outrage, found themselves face to face, alone, and scarcely one hundred feet apart,--a distance which could be traversed in twenty seconds with twenty steps. We have said that Gabriel had stopped short, motionless and rigid as a statue,--like a statue of Vengeance or of Hatred. The king halted, as he suddenly espied the man whom for nearly a year he had seen only in his dreams. The two stood thus for a moment without moving, as if mutually fascinated by each other. In the whirl of sensations and thoughts which filled Gabriel's brain, the poor fellow in his distraction could fix upon no course to adopt, and form no resolution. He waited.