"What is it?" the woman cried to herself, her hand to her breast, her face white. "What? Nothing can be known yet, nothing discovered to warrant their taking me, and--pshaw!--this is a Republican city not a French one. They can do nothing here." Yet, notwithstanding, Emérance went towards the window and endeavoured to see as much as was possible through the long-since uncleaned, diamond panes of the window, and between the rusty iron bars outside. What she could perceive was a dozen or so of horsemen clad in scarlet and green and armed with swords and musquetoons, who surrounded a coach bigger than that in which she had herself journeyed; a coach which had a table inside it and, on that table, a fixed travelling lamp that shone upon and lit up the faces of two women. One, a woman, dark, soft-eyed and rich in colouring, who was superbly dressed; the other, also well favoured but of a more fair complexion and not so handsomely attired. The noise and hubbub below continued as she gazed out; the voice of the landlord was heard yelling orders downstairs and the voice of the landlady screaming similar ones above; the escort--for an escort it was, with which the Duke of Lorraine had furnished the Duchess from Nancy to Basle--had dismounted and were leading their horses away. A moment later, Emérance understood that the Duchess and her following were being shown upstairs. "To the next suite to this," she whispered to herself as she heard voices in the rooms adjoining her own. "Ah! we shall be neighbours. 'Tis well if we encounter each other that she does not know who and what I am." Listening to the sounds proceeding from the next set of rooms, she endeavoured to discover what person might have taken possession of the chamber on the other side of the partition wall. What she heard, however, gave her no clue to that. Something she did hear flung down on a table which, by the rattle and clash it made, gave her, who well knew the sound of such things, the impression of a rapier being thrown on the table after having been unlooped from the wearer's body. And she heard also a man's voice giving orders, and a call from one woman to another in rooms still farther off; but little more than this. Nothing more than the ordinary sounds which, in all times, travellers staying in inns and hotels have heard on the arrival of new-comers in the same house. CHAPTER VIII Meanwhile, the sounds that Emérance had heard in that next set of rooms shut off by the wall from those which she occupied (while being served outside by the same corridor running at right angles from the main passage) had been made by Humphrey West in the room appropriated to him.