She had done, must go on doing for a time, that which she was paid to do. Alas! even as, more than once on this journey, she, all unknown to those others, had been in the same inns with them; as she had crept about dark corridors and staircases endeavouring to hear what they might be saying, above all if they were meditating treachery to _him_, her _adoré_; as, too, she had tried to see and sometimes to possess herself of a letter here and there that had been written by any one of them--so she must continue to do. That those others would put up at the Krone in this city, she knew: she had not failed to learn that, either through her maid's gossip or her purse. The purse that was filled with Spanish gold as payment for her treason to her country and her King, or, doubly bitter thought, might, for aught she knew, be filled by the man of whom her mad love had made her the slave! "The shame of it," she murmured now. "Oh! the shame, the shame of it. I, a woman of gentle blood, well-born, well-nurtured, to sink to this. To this!" and, as she so thought and mused, her eyes would turn furtively towards the window-curtains that shut out the sight of the river though not the sound of its rushing, and she wondered if in the swollen, turbulent stream, there was not a more fitting ending to be found to all her mad folly, her wicked treachery, than in aught else. "If he knew all," she continued to muse now. "If he knew what La Truaumont knows; if he should hear of what I have been in my time accused, would he trust me--a spy!--to spy upon those others? Would he have treated me kindly, or ever, even in his softer moments, have spoken gently to me. Ah! would he! To me, 'Emérance de Villiers-Bordéville,'" and she smiled bitterly, "whose name is false, whose title and rank are spurious. Yet," she went on, endeavouring perhaps to excuse herself to herself; "my own, my real, name is the equal of those assumed ones, if he did but know. Ay! as good as those and, in spite of the cloud that once lowered over it, not smirched and blackened then with the names of spy, _intrigueuse_, adventuress." The logs burnt low and fell together with many a soft clash, while making the woman feel drowsy with their balmy warmth as she sat before the hearth; the cathedral bells from above sounded dreamily to her ears and as though afar off. Even the tall, well-knit and superbly moulded figure and the handsome, dark face of the man whose image was never absent from her mind, were vanishing into the light mists of sleep when, suddenly, she sprang to her feet, startled by what she had heard outside. A bugle had rung below in the open _place_ between the inn and the Rhine; there was the tramping of many horses' hoofs on the rough stones beneath the windows; orders were being shouted, and, mixed with these sounds, the shuffling of feet inside and along the corridors of the inn and the clatter of the chains of the main door being unloosed and the bolts drawn back.