‘As Heaven shall judge me,’ I answered solemnly, ‘that is not true. Until I reached Paris last night I knew nothing of this report. I came here with a single mind, to redeem my honour by placing again in your Eminence’s hands that which you gave me on trust, and here I do place it.’ For a moment he remained in the same attitude, staring at me fixedly. Then his face relaxed somewhat. ‘Be good enough to ring that bell,’ he said. It stood on a table near me. I rang it, and a velvet-footed man in black came in, and gliding up to the Cardinal, placed a paper in his hand. The Cardinal looked at it; while the man stood with his head obsequiously bent, and my heart beat furiously. ‘Very good,’ his Eminence said, after a pause which seemed to me to be endless, ‘Let the doors be thrown open.’ The man bowed low, and retired behind the screen. I heard a little bell ring somewhere in the silence, and in a moment the Cardinal stood up. ‘Follow me!’ he said, with a strange flash of his keen eyes. Astonished, I stood aside while he passed to the screen; then I followed him. Outside the first door, which stood open, we found eight or nine persons--pages, a monk, the major-domo, and several guards waiting like mutes. These signed to me to precede them and fell in behind us, and in that order we passed through the first room and the second, where the clerks stood with bent heads to receive us. The last door, the door of the ante-chamber, flew open as we approached, voices cried, ‘Room! Room for his Eminence!’ we passed through two lines of bowing lackeys, and entered--an empty chamber. The ushers did not know how to look at one another; the lackeys trembled in their shoes. But the Cardinal walked on, apparently unmoved, until he had passed slowly half the length of the chamber. Then he turned himself about, looking first to one side and then to the other, with a low laugh of derision. ‘Father,’ he said in his thin voice, ‘what does the Psalmist say? “I am become like a pelican in the wilderness and like an owl that is in the desert!”’ The monk mumbled assent. ‘And later in the same psalm, is it not written, “They shall perish, but thou shalt endure?”’ ‘It is so,’ the father answered. ‘Amen.’ ‘Doubtless though, that refers to another life,’ the Cardinal said, with his slow wintry smile. ‘In the meantime we will go back to our books, and serve God and the King in small things if not in great. Come, father, this is no longer a place for us. VANITAS VANITATUM OMNIA VANITAS! We will retire.’ And as solemnly as we had come we marched back through the first and second and third doors until we stood again in the silence of the Cardinal’s chamber--he and I and the velvet-footed man in black. For a while Richelieu seemed to forget me. He stood brooding on the hearth, his eyes on a small fire, which burned there though the weather was warm. Once I heard him laugh, and twice he uttered in a tone of bitter mockery the words,-- ‘Fools! Fools! Fools!’