Cautiously, as was her custom, Madame Granier had peered through the thick _grille_ of the water-door before admitting the Professor and the Abbé John. Silent as a spectre Anthony Arpajon had entered from the other side by his own private passage, locking the iron port behind him. They sat together in Dame Granier's wide kitchen, without any lighting of lamps or candles. But the wood burned red on the hearth, above which Dame Granier kept deftly shifting the _pot-au-feu_, so that none of its contents might be burned. Each time she did so she thrust in underneath smaller branches, gleaned from last year's willow-pollarding. The light flared up sharply with little spitting, crackling noises, so that all in the kitchen saw each other clearly. Now they discussed matters from the standpoint of the Château. That was the Professor, with a little assistance from John d'Albret, a poor prince of the blood some-few-times-removed. They talked it over from the point of view of the town. It was Anthony Arpajon who led, the widow Granier adding a word or two. They heard, in a low whisper, the most private states of mind of the King, seen only by those who had the right to penetrate into his cabinet. It was a red-haired, keen-eyed fanatic who spoke of this, with the accent and Biblical phraseology of Geneva--namely, one Johannus Stirling, Doctor in Theology, commonly denominated Jean-aux-Choux, the Fool of the Three Henries. As for Claire Agnew, she gazed steadily into the fire, elbow on knee, her rounded chin set in the palm of her hand, and her dark curls pushing themselves in dusky confusion about her cheek. The Abbé John was the only person at all uneasy. Yet it was not the distant dubious sounds from the town which troubled him, nor yet the cries of the boatmen of St. Victor dropping down under the bridge of Vienne, the premier arch of which sprang immediately out by the gable of Dame Granier's house. No, the Abbé John was uneasy because he wished to move his little three-legged stool nearer to the black oaken settle at the corner of which sat Claire Agnew. The Leaguers might seize his person to make him a king--in default of better. Well, he would keep out of their way. His cousin, the Bearnais, would certainly give him a company in the best-ordered army in the world. His other yet more distant cousin, Philip of Spain, would, if he caught him, present him with a neat arrangement in yellow, with flames and devils painted in red all over it. Then, all for the glory of God, he would burn him alive because of consorting with the heretic. Many careers were thus opening to the young man. But just at present, and, indeed, ever since he had looked at her across the dead man, stretched so starkly out among the themes and lectures on Professor Anatole's Sorbonne table, John d'Albret had felt that his true call in life was to minister to the happiness of Mistress Claire Agnew. And incidentally, in so doing, to his own.