"She sets out for Geneva and thence across the St. Bernard, accompanied by Mademoiselle d'Angelis and Humphrey West, there to meet her sister. With her go Fleur de Mai and Boisfleury. Brutes, without doubt! yet savage, ferocious ones. Good swordsmen both and reckless. I am not wanted here and I am wanted there" nodding his head in the direction where he supposed--or perhaps, knew--Normandy might happen to be. "What is Affinius to tell us?" "Everything he dared not write in his letter to De Beaurepaire. The remaining money that Spain puts at our disposal, the hour when the Dutch fleet will attack, which is again to be made known by an arranged piece of false news on the subject of the King's creation of two more new marshals. The time when the Norman gentlemen are to rise and also be ready to admit the Dutch and Spanish to Quillebeuf." "And he? De Beaurepaire?" "_Sangdieu!_ he is then to declare himself. Our old Norman aristocracy will accept a man of high lineage as their leader. Louise----" "Ha! What? Hsh." "I should say, Emérance. The man you admire may rise even higher yet than the proud position of a De Beaurepaire. He may become, if all goes well, the head of a Republic greater than that of Holland, which follows Spain in her attempts to help us because she must; a Republic a hundred times greater than this little thing wherein we now are. Or he may become a----" "What?"--the eyes of Emérance sparkling with excitement. "He may become a king." "Never. He, a king! A member of that great family which has for its proud motto, '_Après le Roi--moi!_' Never!" "They said it, they took that motto," La Truaumont whispered, while smiling cynically, "when there was no chance, no likelihood of their ever reaching so dizzy a height as that of king. Let us see what this member of their house will say if that glittering bauble, a crown, is held out for him to snatch at." "A king," Emérance said again. "A king!" she whispered, "of France. Oh! it is impossible." Nevertheless, as she so thought and spoke her heart was beating tumultuously within her, her brain was on fire at the very imagining of such a thing as La Truaumont had conjured up. To see him--him, her love, her master!--a king. "But, ah!" she murmured to herself, as she still sat in front of the now almost extinct logs on the hearth, while La Truaumont watched her out of the corners of his eyes, "it is a dream. A dream that he should be a king or ever any more than, if all goes well, the ruler of a province, our province. A dream, too, that may have a rude awakening. What was it he said to me ere I left Paris? That, if he failed, the cross roads outside some town, a gallows outside the Bastille, would more likely be his portion. Ah! well, so be it. Throne or gibbet, whichever you reach, Louis de Beaurepaire, I shall not be far away. If the throne, then I shall be near you though ever in the dark background; if the gibbet, by your side. That may be best."