"The landlord, madame, is bewildered. He comes with the pass-keys to open all the doors of their rooms. As for the man, Boisfleury, he is outside. He waits on Madame la Duchesse." "Take him into the salon. And, Jacquette, give me my robe. Quick. 'Twill cover this _négligé_." While, as she spoke, she seized the masses of long hair that hung down her back and twisted them up into a huge knot upon her head. After which she thrust her little feet into a pair of warm, soft slippers and entered the salon followed by Jacquette. Before her there stood the man, Boisfleury, white and shaky looking, so that, as Hortense shrewdly suspected, he had been hastily summoned from his bed, wherein, she did not doubt, he had been sleeping off the potency of the draughts in which he and his companion nightly indulged. "What know you of these absent men?" she asked now, while her usually soft, velvety eyes looked anything but softly into those of the man before her so that, either from their piercing glance, or from the vision of beauty _en déshabille_ which confronted him--or, perhaps, from that other cause which the Duchess had suspected--he shivered and shook before her. "What know you, I say? Answer, man, and stand not trembling thus. Speak, fellow." "Most gracious lady, I know nothing. Last night I sought my bed early, the better to be ready for our departure this morning and----" "Got you that wound on your face in your bed? 'Tis a strange place to encounter such a thing." "Madame la Duchesse, I fell upon the stairs and hurt myself." "It resembles not a bruise. More like unto a sharp cut. Yet this is nought to me. Tell me, I say, what you know of the absence of those three. Of the young English seigneur, of your leader, the captain, and your boon companion?" "Gracious lady," Boisfleury said again, "I know nothing. The young English seigneur I saw not at all. Madame la Duchesse will remember that he abode not with us but with madame and mademoiselle," directing his eyes towards Jacquette. "The noble captain supped alone very early and then retired at once. As for Fleur de Mai and me, we supped together; he drank more than was good for him--as--as I warned him--and then rolled himself in his cloak and slept before the fire. Whereon I sought my bed." "I will have the house ransacked to find one at least of them," the Duchess exclaimed, her eyes ablaze; "nay, I will have the whole of this heretical, canticle-singing town ransacked, if I can do so, to find him. For the others I care not, no, not even if they have gone to their master the devil! While as for you----" "As for me, most noble dame?" Boisfleury repeated, cringingly, though with a strange gleam in his eye. "As for me, Madame la Duchesse?" "I do not believe you. If we were in Paris you should be sent to the Bastille or La Tournelle----" "Madame la Duchesse has shaken the dust of Paris off her feet," the man answered, with an insolent leer. "We shall not meet in Paris when I return to it."