"The Grand Master has sent word to the Keeper of the Seals to be sure not to fail to attend this Council; a good many letters patent will be issued, no doubt." "How is it that the Queen-mother remains below, in her own rooms, at such a juncture?" "They are going to make things hot for us," said Groslot to Cardinal de Châtillon. In short, every one had something to say. Some were pacing the room from end to end, others were flitting round the maids of honor, as though it could be possible to catch a few words through a wall three feet thick, or two doors and the heavy curtains that screened them. The King, seated at one end of the long table covered with blue velvet, which stood in the middle of the room, his young Queen in an armchair at his side, was waiting for his mother. Robertet was mending his pens. The two Cardinals, the Grand Master, the Chancellor, the Keeper of the Seals--in short, the whole assembly, looked at the little King, wondering why he did not give the word for them all to be seated. "Are we to sit in council in the absence of the Queen-mother?" the Chancellor asked, addressing the young King. The two Guises ascribed Catherine's absence to some cunning trick of their niece's. Then, spurred by a significant look, the much daring Cardinal said to the King: "Is it your Majesty's goodwill that we should proceed without madame your mother?" Francis, not daring to have an opinion of his own, replied: "Gentlemen, be seated." The Cardinal briefly pointed out the dangers of the situation. This great politician, who showed astounding skill in this business, broached the question of the lieutenancy amid utter silence. The young King was, no doubt, conscious of an awkwardness, and guessed that his mother had a real sense of the rights of the Crown, and a knowledge of the danger that threatened his power, for he replied to a direct question on the Cardinal's part: "We will wait for my mother." Enlightened by this inexplicable delay on Queen Catherine's part, Mary Stuart suddenly recalled in a single flash of thought three incidents which were clear in her memory. In the first place, the bulk of the packet presented to her mother-in-law, which she had seen, though so inattentive at the moment (for a woman who seems to see nothing is still a lynx), then the place where Christophe had carried them to separate them from hers. "Why?" she said to herself. And then she remembered the boy's cold look, which she at once ascribed to the Reformers' hatred of the Guises' niece. A voice within her cried, "Is he not an envoy from the Huguenots?" Acting, as all hasty persons do, on the first impulse, she exclaimed: "I myself will go and fetch my mother."