At last he looked up, saw me, and started. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘I had forgotten you. Well, you are fortunate, M. de Berault. Yesterday I had a hundred clients; to-day I have only one, and I cannot afford to hang him. But for your liberty that is another matter.’ I would have said something, pleaded something; but he turned abruptly to the table, and sitting down wrote a few lines on a piece of paper. Then he rang his bell, while I stood waiting and confounded. The man in black came from behind the screen. ‘Take this letter and that gentleman to the upper guard-room,’ the Cardinal said sharply. ‘I can hear no more,’ he continued, frowning and raising his hand to forbid interruption. ‘The matter is ended, M. de Berault. Be thankful.’ In a moment I was outside the door, my head in a whirl, my heart divided between gratitude and resentment. I would fain have stood to consider my position; but I had no time. Obeying a gesture, I followed my guide along several passages, and everywhere found the same silence, the same monastic stillness. At length, while I was dolefully considering whether the Bastille or the Chatelet would be my fate, he stopped at a door, thrust the letter into my hands, and lifting the latch, signed to me to enter. I went in in amazement, and stopped in confusion. Before me, alone, just risen from a chair, with her face one moment pale, the next crimson with blushes, stood Mademoiselle de Cocheforet. I cried out her name. ‘M. de Berault,’ she said, trembling. ‘You did not expect to see me?’ ‘I expected to see no one so little, Mademoiselle,’ I answered, striving to recover my composure. ‘Yet you might have thought that we should not utterly desert you,’ she replied, with a reproachful humility which went to my heart. ‘We should have been base indeed, if we had not made some attempt to save you. I thank Heaven, M. de Berault, that it has so far succeeded that that strange man has promised me your life. You have seen him?’ she continued eagerly and in another tone, while her eyes grew on a sudden large with fear. ‘Yes, Mademoiselle,’ I said. ‘I have seen him, and it is true, He has given me my life.’ ‘And--?’ ‘And sent me into imprisonment.’ ‘For how long?’ she whispered. ‘I do not know,’ I answered. ‘I fear during the King’s pleasure.’ She shuddered. ‘I may have done more harm than good,’ she murmured, looking at me piteously. ‘But I did it for the best. I told him all, and perhaps I did harm.’ But to hear her accuse herself thus, when she had made this long and lonely journey to save me, when she had forced herself into her enemy’s presence, and had, as I was sure she had, abased herself for me, was more than I could bear.