At last, late in the afternoon, the lad Blaise came for me in great haste.

"Mademoiselle, the King is asking for you."

"For me? How can that be?"

"I only know what I am told," he answered, fumbling at his bonnet.

"Is that all Monsieur de Commines' message?"

I have studied boys as well as men, and from his confusion I guessed his mind was burdened by more than he had delivered. At the question, his face flushed red in the sunlight, and he broke out—

"Mademoiselle, I hate the court, and court ways. God made me for a plain soldier, and not to truckle in mud."

"Wait," said I; "presently you will find that mud is your surest stepping-place to fortune. What more had you to say?"

"Monsieur de Commines beseeches you not to be angry if the King thinks evil of you; if he even puts a vile construction on your friendship for Monsieur de Helville."

"The King can think no more vilely of me than I of him," I answered hotly. Then my heart leaped into my mouth. Not for myself; for me the bitterness of fear was long past: but with that illumination which they say the drowning have at the last, I suddenly realised that Gaspard's life hung not alone on my powers of pleading, but on my self-control. All my grown years I had hated, loathed, and despised Louis of Valois, not only as the merciless enemy of Navarre, but as the vilest, meanest cunning spirit that ever made flesh contemptible. What if that loathing and despisal crept into my pleading and pled against me? What if that hatred, which to me was almost a religion, flashed through my prayer and blasted the King's mercy? What if they hardened Louis' softer mood, and so left me all my life guilty of Gaspard's blood? What if——

"Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!" cried Blaise, half piteously, half in indignation. "Do not look so horrified, so troubled. It was a lie, we all know it was a lie."

"Did Monsieur de Commines say, It is a lie?"

"For policy's sake, Mademoiselle——"

"Policy! policy! policy! That is Monsieur de Commines all over. Truth? There is no truth, there is only policy. A woman's honour? her reputation? her good name? To his slippery, pliant policy all these are nothing. There, there, Monsieur Blaise, it is my turn to say, do not look so horrified! Monsieur de Commines is his master's mirror."

At the first door a red-haired youth whom Blaise called Davidd was waiting for us, and with him as surety we passed through guard after guard unchallenged. Up what stairs, along what corridors, through what anterooms we were led I do not know; nor could I tell whether the furnishings of Plessis were those of the palace or the prison. If the hanging, were of silk I did not see them; if there were carvings, gildings, fretwork, my eyes passed them blindly by. Only there were men everywhere, men who whispered eagerly together in groups of threes and fours, and who turned to watch us curiously as we left them behind.

Before an open door, guarded as every other door had been through which we had come, Monsieur de Commines was waiting for us.

"Come!" said he, brusquely, almost dragging me after him, while Blaise and Davidd stood aside, "and remember, no matter what he may say, remember more than de Helville's life hangs on the turn of a word."

"I am not afraid," I began.

"But I am," he interrupted, "horribly, horribly afraid."

"Hey! Is that de Helville's woman, d'Argenton?" said a weak, whispering voice from the end of the room. It was the King, pipingly thin and harshly raucous by turns as weakness of flesh or strength of spirit got the upper hand. "Get out of the light, and let me look at her. Heh! heh! heh!" and he laughed a little snickering laugh through his nose. "What a lover he was, that de Helville! Bloused as a poppy or peaked and pale, they were all as one to him. What is your name, girl?"

From where he stood, a little in advance of me, I saw Monsieur de Commines start. He even opened his mouth as if to speak, but though he kept silence, his side-long glance was at once an entreaty and a repetition of his warning.

"Ah! Sire," said I, "might I not be spared that?"

"You can understand, your Majesty," said Monseigneur, his voice hard and jerky as if in bad control, "that under the circumstances Mademoiselle would prefer——"

"Of course," broke in Louis, though how can I give the cutting contempt of his sneer? "Modest retirement at all times becomes a woman. Meek virtue that consorts with this Hellewyl from Navarre to Poictiers, and heaven knows how long before, is shocked at the bare whispering of its name! Heh! heh! heh! What do they call you, girl?"

"It is not that, Sire," said Monsieur de Commines hastily, waving a monitory hand at me behind his back that I should keep silence. It was a hard thing to ask a woman at such a time and under such an imputation; but it was Gaspard's life I played for, and so I controlled myself. "Not that, ah, no! such brazen bashfulness would truly be absurd—in such a woman as your Majesty describes. But Hellewyl is unhappily in disgrace——"

"Disgrace!" cried Louis, his voice strengthening to a screech. "God's name! man, have you no better word than that? A damned treacherous cur who has cost France a province, and you sweetly lisp he is unhappily in disgrace! If to hang like a common thief is disgrace, and no more than disgrace, then, yes, yes, you are right, your Monsieur de Helville is in disgrace. But he was always a friend of yours, Monsieur le prince?" Flinging back the scarlet cape that covered his meagre shoulders, Louis tore open his cambric vest at the throat and lay back on his high pillows, gasping. "Coctier! Coctier! Come to me, Coctier!—My heart—ah! miserable sinner that I am—my heart as Father Francis says, is deceitful and desperately weak. I cannot trust it, cannot trust it."

The King's bed faced a range of windows opening to the west. Above the head a huge canopy projected, the hangings of which had been removed for sake of air; only at the extreme ends were there curtains remaining. These were drawn back as flat to the wall as the heavy silk would pack, but the carved pillars which supported the canopy gave a heavy, cumbersome appearance to the bed. Between these pillars cushions had been piled, raising the King almost to a sitting posture, but with complete and much-needed support.

Never had I seen such an anatomy of a man, and had he not been Louis of Valois I could have wept for pity. His eyes, filmed with grey and colourless from weakness, were sunk deep in a skull to which the skin clung flat, yellow as ancient parchment, and forcing into relief every bony curve and prominence. Naked in throat and chest, the tense sinews played up and down in the lean neck with every articulation, while across the hollow chest the bones showed like white knuckles through the strained skin. His loose sleeves had fallen back beyond the elbow, and the bare arms, stretched downwards on the counterpane, were shrunken to a skeleton. For four days no razor had touched him, and a thin frost lay upon the mouth, framing into relief the cruel straight lines of the sunken lips, through which the gapped and blackened teeth showed at every sneering laugh or outburst of rage. Had he died, and had his father the devil, entering in, raised him to life again, he could not have looked more like a mask of wasted malevolent mortality.

"Coctier!" he went on, slanting his eyes at us without turning his head. "They will kill me, Coctier, if they cross me like this."

From behind the shelter of the twisted pillar of the bedstead a man in a loose suit of grey stuffs leaned over him, putting a cup to his mouth.

"You hear, Monsieur d'Argenton? The responsibility is yours."

"His Majesty sent for—for—this lady," answered Monseigneur doggedly, "and, Sire, truly you mistake. What this—lady fears, is lest your righteous anger should strike more than Monsieur de Helville."

Sucking the liquid from the cup with as much noise and spilling of its contents as if he had been a half-weaned child, the King pointed a shaking finger at............