My intention was to ask Jean Volran for an empty room in which to examine the King's letter, and at the foot of the stair I found him waiting. But it was not the Jean Volran I had known for a night and morning. The obsequious smile, the almost servile cringing, were no longer there; there was no deferential welcome for the great, no fawning upon the happy man who bore the King's letter and was the King's will in the flesh.

Then, had I said, Set La Voulle ablaze and thrust your hand into the fire, Le Roy le veult, he would have done it and made no protest. Now his back was as straight as my own, his mien as distant, his eye as supercilious. He eyen outstared me, as if he were Gaspard Hellewyl and I Jean Volran.

"You have kept me waiting, Monsieur," said he, pushing a door open and leading the way into just such a room as I desired.

"I? I have kept you waiting? What insolence is this?"

"Tut, tut!" he retorted, turning his back on me while he closed the door carefully. "Did you really think that for such a post as this his Majesty had chosen a man with no better brains than to fill wine pots for fools to empty? You have not only kept me waiting, but, what is worse, you have wasted your time with your dilly-dallying, and made the King to wait also. I would have had what was wanted here inside of a week. Why the King chose to employ you at all is a mystery, unless it was that if his plan miscarried it would please him better to see a Flanders man hang for it. The King did not send you to Morsigny to gather roses," he went on with a sneer and a nod at the flower I carried buckled to my bonnet, "but I guessed the message I brought you yesterday would put another thought than girls and girls' love tokens into your head."

"You? None but goatherds passed Morsigny yesterday."

"And I was one of them, as I have been many things in his Majesty's service. Now, Monsieur, the King's letter, if you please."

But there I had him at a disadvantage, and was in no mood to abate a jot of it.

"Be what you like, goatherd, scullion, tapster," I answered, with as brusque an incivility as his own, "that is between you and the King, and no odds to me, but the letter is my affair."

"Why, man," he cried, too astounded at my opposition to take offence, "don't you know you are but a catspaw, and I am here to finish the affair? Come, come, you have cackled your little crow over me, and we are quits—the letter, and waste no time."

"Even allowing for the goatherd and scullion," I answered, "I take you for a kind of a gentleman, and so do not say you lie, only, I heard nothing of this at Plessis. On the contrary, His Majesty was quite clear, that which I began I was to finish. Show me your warrant, but I warn you, nothing less than the King's signet and sign manual will move me."

For a moment he stood clenching and unclenching his hands before him, too full of passion to find words. Had he not been in his innkeeper's dress, and so without a sword, he would have tried force, so mad with rage was he. Then he turned aside to the window, and stared between the bars into the court where Martin was rubbing down Roland.

"You play your game with a high hand, Monsieur," he said at last; "but if you think I have sweated here in the grime all these weeks while you were feasting at Morsigny, just to see you pocket the profits, you don't know your man."

But when, with another turn of his heel, he would have stridden past me, I stepped between him and the door.

"Monsieur, who shall pay you your wages I do not know, but you are not coming back to stab me unawares and rob me of what the King has committed to my trust. Since you have brought me here to this room, in this room you shall stay until I have read his Majesty's letter. Nor do I see why we should quarrel. If the end of this affair has indeed been committed to you, show me some token? God knows I have no love for the work. You have no token? No warrant? Nothing but your bare word? Then, since you profess to know so much, tell me at least what steps I am next to take, something, anything to prove you are in the King's confidence, and that your bare word is not a bare lie? You cannot? Then tell me this: if you were Gaspard Hellewyl, and I you, how far would you trust the man who came with nothing but a blustering wheedle of words in his mouth? Not a foot! Not an inch! Nor will I. It is my life, Monsieur Tapster-goatherd, it is my honour, and by God! I'll give neither the one nor the other to your keeping. Stand there by the window, Monsieur, and if the King bids me give you the letter, or—or anything else I control except these two, then, on the faith of a gentleman, you shall have it, but not unless."

Three times while I spoke I saw No! in his face, though he answered nothing; but as I ended, he half laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and did as he was bidden with a swagger that matched his clothing badly. Who he was, or what his rank, I never knew, but clothes so much make the man that not even the Prince de Talmont himself would in like circumstances have looked anything else than that very ridiculous object—a country inn-keeper in a rage.

Partly to gain time for thought, but partly, I confess, that his helplessness might gall him deeper, I played with the King's letter, examining silk, seal, and superscription as if all were strange, instead of as familiar as the bottom of my own pocket. The situation was growing clearer to me with every passing minute, and it will have been noticed that I do not think rapidly.

No doubt the fellow glowering at me from the window shutter was not alone in La Voulle; no doubt, too, his ten-crowns-a-month-cut-throats would be this, that, or the other about the inn—groom, drawer, even cook. Three or four of these there might be, but not more. Where there is a secret, there is no safety in numbers. Against these I had only Martin, unless, indeed, I played the bold game of raising La Voulle to defend its young Count, and as a climax carried him off myself! My scheme would have to be recast, which was a pity; its very simplicity had guaranteed success. But the nature and extent of the change must depend on the King's wishes, so with a smiling nod of encouragement in patience to my host at the window, I broke the seal.

Either the crackle of the paper or the polite impertinence roused him. Setting his foot against the angle of the wall, he stiffened himself for a spring. Once he had me on my back, circumstances would lead him. If his own fellows came in just then, there was an end to Gaspard Hellewyl; if La Voulle heard the scuffle, he would cry Treachery! and trust for justification to the King's letter found in my hands. But I saw the move, and hitched the handle of my sword forward a foot. It was a parry to his thrust, and back he lounged again against the shutters.

Tearing the outer wrappings to small pieces, I scattered them on the floor. The next sheet was a blank, nor, though I held it up to the light, could I trace a mark of any kind. Not so the third sheet, for eight or ten words were sprawled across it in short sentences. But at the first line the exultation of triumph over my enemy by the window fell cold and flat; the letter was in Latin, an............