The Rising Storm

"Monsieur. I regret the steps which have been necessary to bring you before us; but you have suffered no harm; and will suffer none, provided you obey me. It is known to us that you carry a letter from the Queen of France to her brother the Grand Duke. Be good enough to hand it to me, and a guide will be provided to escort you back to your lodging."

Roger used his lashes to veil his eyes as he stumbled unsteadily to his feet. He could not even guess how the object of his visit to Florence had become known, or what possible reason the Holy Office could have for wanting to get possession of the Queen's letter; but he instantly made up his mind to admit nothing until it transpired how fully informed they really were about his activities.

For a moment he remained silent, so that when he spoke his voice should be as firm as possible. Then, in an attempt to bluff his way out of their clutches, he said:

"Signor. I protest most strongly at your abduction of me. The only excuse there can be for it is that your bravos mistook me for some other person. I demand that you release me at once, or His Highness the Grand Duke shall hear of it; and I am told that he is swift to punish such of his subjects as molest foreign visitors in his capital."

"You use bold words, young man," said the central figure quietly, "but they will gain you nothing. Your threat is an empty one; and it seems that I must give you a word of caution. It would not be the first time that this tribunal has decreed death for those who oppose its will. There is an oubliette less than a hundred feet from where you stand and in the past few centuries many bodies have gone down it to be swept away by the undercurrents of the Arno. These old Florentine cellars keep their secrets well, and unless you wish to add to their number you will say no more of making complaint to His Highness. Now; give me the letter that you carry."

Roger paled slightly under his tan. The cellar was lit only by two three-branched candlesticks, each placed near one end of the long table; the corners of the room were full of shadows and the row of black, hooded figures in front of him had no resemblance to normal human beings. They sat unmoving, with their black-gloved hands folded before them on the table. Only the eyes, seen through the slits in their hoods, showed that they lived and were regarding him with cold, impassive curiosity.

In such surroundings it was difficult to make himself believe that their spokesman was trying only to frighten him; yet he strove to do so, by calling to mind that however horrible the fate to which the Inquisi­tion had condemned its victims in the old days, it had never, as far as he knew, practised secret murder. All the same, he found that his lips had suddenly gone dry, and he had to moisten them with the tip of his tongue before saying a trifle hoarsely:

"I repeat, Signor, you have made an error concerning me. I carry no letter from the Queen of France, and know nothing of one."

"Yet you are the Chevalier de Breuc, are you not?"

Feeling that as they were aware of his identity it would prejudice his chances to deny it, Roger replied: "I am; and I am recently arrived from France. But my sole reason for coming here is to see the beauties and art treasures of your city."

"Monsieur, it will go ill with you if you continue to trifle with us. At the time of your arrest tonight you were on your way to an audience with Monsignor Scipione Ricci, and your object in seeking an audience was to hand him this letter. You cannot deny that."

"I do." Roger answered with a modicum of truth; for he had had no intention of surrendering the letter to anyone other than the Grand Duke, and had meant only to approach the Minister as the most suitable person to secure him a private audience with the Sovereign.

"What, then, were you doing in the streets of Florence at an hour approaching midnight?" asked the spokesman of the nine.

Roger shrugged, and tried to look a little sheepish. "I am young and have the natural inclination of my years towards gallantry. As I have not the acquaintance of any ladies in your city I thought I would go out, on the chance that on so fine a summer night I might come upon some fair one seated at her window or on a balcony, who would feel inclined to take compassion on me."

It was a good, plausible lie; but the nine pairs of eyes continued to regard him with cold, calculating suspicion, and the spokesman said: "Upon the information we have received I cannot believe you. I should be reluctant to put you to the indignity of a forced search; but we intend to have that letter. For the last time, I bid you give it me."

"Search me if you will, Signor." Roger spread out his hands in a little foreign gesture that he had picked up in France during his youth. "But you will not find this letter you seek, for I have not got it."

The principal Inquisitor spoke in Italian to the hooded figures at each extremity of the table. Obediently they stood up, came over to Roger, and spent some minutes searching him with considerable thoroughness. Raising his arms he submitted quietly, knowing that their labours would be in vain.

As they returned to the table empty-handed he felt a new confidence in his prospects. Now that their information had been proved to be incorrect he had a fair hope that they would accept his statement that he was not the man they were looking for, and release him.

But his hopes were doomed to disappointment. The spokesman picked up a small silver hand-bell that stood in front of him and rang it. The door opened and one of the men in leather jerkins appeared. An order was given and the door closed again. For a few minutes Roger remained facing the line of sinister, black-clad figures while complete silence reigned. He wondered anxiously what this last move foreboded. Did they mean to let him go; or would they consider it necessary to protect themselves from his reporting the manner in which he had been attacked to the authorities, and take measures to ensure that he should never have the chance to do so ? Involuntarily a shiver ran down his spine.

The door opened once more. A new figure entered. It was that of a man in a long-skirted coat of bright-blue satin. He wore no mask and, having bowed in the doorway, advanced carrying his three-cornered hat under his arm. Even before the newcomer had emerged far enough from the shadows for his features to be seen distinctly Roger recognized him. It was de Roubec.

Instantly now, Roger realized what had led to his being in his present plight. On finding Isabella's reinforced escort too much for him the lantern-jawed Chevalier had not given up the game and returned to Paris, as they had supposed. Instead, he must have decided to take the direct overland route via Chambery, Turin and Milan to Florence, in order to await their arrival there; and only then, when they were off their guard, make another attempt to secure the Queen's letter before it could be delivered to her brother. The only thing that Roger could not understand was how the rapscallion adventurer had managed to inveigle the Holy Inquisition into pulling his chestnuts out of the fire for him.

De Roubec took a few more paces- forward, bowed again to the sinister tribunal; then, with a mocking smile, to Roger.

Controlling his fury with an effort, Roger not only refrained from returning the bow, but met the Chevalier's glance with cold indifference, as though he had never set eyes on him before.

The spokesman of the hooded men addressed de Roubec. "The prisoner admits that he is Monsieur le Chevalier de Breuc, but denies all knowledge of the letter. Are you quite certain that you have made no mistake, and that this is the man that you required us to arrest ?"

"It is indeed, Monsiegneur. I know him too well to be mistaken."

"He has been searched and the letter is not on him."

De Roubec gave Roger a suspicious glance. "Perhaps, Monseigneur, he did not after all intend to deliver it tonight."

"Our information that he had been bidden to wait upon Monsignor Ricci at a half hour after eleven came from an impeccable source."

"Even so, Monseigneur," de Roubec submitted deferentially, "he may have been prepared to deliver such a letter only into the hands of His Highness personally. If it was not found on him, he must have left it at his lodgings, in the care of the Senorita d'Aranda."

"The Senorita d'Aranda!" exclaimed one of the hooded men half­way down the line on the spokesman's left. Then he asked in bad French: "Did I hear aright? If so, how comes she into this?"

Roger felt his heart jump, and looked at de Roubec in fresh alarm, as the Chevalier replied to his new interlocutor.

"It is my belief, Signor, that Her Majesty originally handed her despatch to the Senorita d'Aranda, when that lady left the Court of France to travel to Italy. In an attempt to secure it I organized a hold-up of her coach near Nevers, but Monsieur de Breuc's inopportune arrival on the scene caused the affair to miscarry. They continued on their way south in company, and hired additional coach-guards, which would have rendered any further attempt of this kind too costly. I decided to ride on direct to Florence and enlist your help against their arrival. But as far as I know they have been together ever since. At all events, they have both been lying these last two nights at del Sarte Inglesi in the via dei Fossi, and unobserved by them I have seen them several times visiting the galleries together."

"But what you tell me is extraordinary!" cried the hooded man who had challenged de Roubec about Isabella. "If the Senorita d'Aranda is in Florence, why has she not sought the hospitality of her aunt, the Contessa Frescobaldi?"

Roger's hands were trembling. He now felt that at all costs he must intervene.

"Signor!" he said quickly. "I can explain this matter. As you may know, the Senorita is proceeding to Naples in order to be married there. At Marseilles, no ship was due to sail for Naples under three weeks, but one was leaving for Leghorn almost immediately. Therefore, in order to get to Naples the quicker she decided to travel by this slightly longer route. Had she informed her aunt that she was passing through Florence, she thought that the, Contessa would have insisted on her breaking her journey here for not less than a week. She felt that she could not deny herself two days in which to visit the galleries, but was most opposed to delaying longer; so she decided to risk her aunt's later displeasure by maintaining an incognito while in your city. She is resuming her journey to Naples tomorrow."

The original spokesman rapped the table impatiently and said something in Italian to his colleagues. Roger just caught its sense, which was:

"Gentlemen! The time of the tribunal is being wasted. The fact that some young woman elected to stay in a lodging, rather than with her aunt, is no concern of ours." He then looked again at Roger and resumed in his careful French:

"You admit, then, that although the document we require was not originally entrusted to you, this lady with whom you travelled has it; and that you acted as her escort in order to prevent it being taken from her?"

"By no means," Roger replied quickly. "I am certain that she knows no more of it than myself. As I have told you, it was not her intention to pass through Florence, and she would never have come here at all had it not been that there was no ship sailing from Marseilles under three weeks by which she could travel direct to Naples.'? Then he shot out an accusing finger at de Roubec, and went on:

"But this rogue here has already confessed to you how he and his bullies attacked the Senorita's coach. We thought it was her jewels on which they wished to lay their dirty fingers. It was to assist in frustrating any further such attempts that I offered her my escort."

De Roubec gave Roger an ugly look, and muttered: "Put a guard upon your tongue, Chevalier, or I will make you pay dearly for such insults."

Roger swung angrily upon him. " 'Tis you who are due to pay by the loss of your ears for the treacherous theft you long ago committed upon me. And as a bonus, for this present business, I will slice off your nose into the bargain."

"Silence!" cried the spokesman, again rapping the table; then he once more addressed Roger: "I am convinced that this young woman with whom you are travelling has the Queen's letter. Either you will obtain it from her and hand it over to a representative whom I shall send back with you to your lodging for that purpose, or I shall take steps to have her lured forth and brought here. In the latter case we shall soon find means to loosen her tongue, and when she has disclosed its hiding-place I will send someone to collect it. Now; which course do you prefer that I should adopt?"

Roger stared down at the silver buckles of his shoes while swiftly considering the dilemma with which he was now faced. He still had one good card up his sleeve, but did not wish to play it if that could possibly be avoided.

Seeing his hesitation the Chief of the tribunal said: "If you force me to it I shall not hesitate to use torture. But I would much prefer that the matter should be cleared up without harm to either the Senorita or yourself. Therefore, I will not press you for an immediate answer. In any case it would be preferable to avoid arousing comment by knocking up the people at your lodging in the middle of the night, and the tribunal has other business which will occupy it for some hours to come. You may utilize those hours to make your decision, and I will send for you to learn it a little before dawn."

He rang his silver bell and the two men-at-arms appeared again. Between them Roger was marched away down a gloomy corridor, a door near its end was opened, and, there being no alternative, he entered a narrow cell. One of the men set down a single candle on the stone floor, then the door was slammed to and the key grated in its lock.

The cell was quite bare, and windowless, its only inlet for air being a row of round holes in the upper part of the heavy door. Apart from a wide stone bench long enough to sleep on, which protruded from one wall, it contained nothing whatever. Roger sat down on the slab and began to think matters out.

One thing was clear: de Roubec had himself confirmed that it was his machinations which had led to the present situation, and that it was for him that the Holy Office were endeavouring to get hold of the Queen's letter. It also seemed evident that Signor Zucchino must be one of the Inquisitor's spies, and had reported Roger's visit; as in what other way could they have learnt that the major-domo had made an appointment for him to wait on Monsignor Ricci that night?

Roger was much comforted by the thought that he had it in his power to prevent Isabella being drawn into the affair. All he had to do was to agree to return to his lodgings in the morning and hand over the letter. But he wondered if there was not some way in which he might secure his freedom without doing that. The Inquisitor's reluctance to arouse the inmates of Pisani's house showed that they were anxious to avoid drawing attention to their activities; so it seemed probable that they would now wait until the following evening, then send a messenger to inform Isabella that he had met with an accident, and bring her to a place where she could be overcome under cover of darkness with a minimum risk of disturbance.

If that proved to be their intention she would have the whole of the coming day in which to endeavour to find him. She must already be worried by his non-return. First thing in the morning she would go to the Pitti and insist on seeing Monsignor Ricci. The probability was that Zucchino had never made the appointment at all. In any case it would come out that his intending visitor had never arrived there. If the Minister showed indifference to the matter, however reluctant Isabella might be to let her aunt know of her presence in Florence, the odds were that her acute anxiety would drive her to do so. There would be no necessity for her to disclose the fact that he was her fiancé; she could enlist her aunt's aid immediately by telling a part of the truth—that he was the bearer of a despatch from Queen Marie Antoinette to the Grand Duke, had saved her from attack upon the road, and given her his escort as far as Florence. The Contessa would at once go to the Grand Duchess, who, on account of the letter, if for no other reason, would report his disappearance without delay to the Grand Duke. Then the whole of His Highness's secret police would be put on to the job of finding him.

Whether they would succeed in doing so before nightfall remained problematical. But even then, if Isabella had secured the protection of either Monsignor Ricci or the Contessa, she would inform them of any message she received, and they would have her followed; so instead of her failing into a trap, she would lead the forces of law and order to his prison.

The more Roger thought the matter over the more inclined he became to stand firm and put his trust in Isabella's succeeding in rescuing him. But one thing remained a puzzle and defeated all his efforts to solve it. How had de Roubec managed to secure the assistance, of the Holy Office?

De Roubec was the agent of the Due d'Orleans, and His Highness was the supreme head of all the Freemasons in France. The Masons were freethinkers and revolutionaries, so regarded by the Church as its bitterest enemies. Yet the Chief Inquisitor had actually used the words when speaking of his prisoner to de Roubec: "Are you quite certain that you have made no mistake, and that this is the man that you required us to arrest?" To "require" signified to "order", and inexplic­able as it seemed that de Roubec should have persuaded the Holy Office to help him, the idea that he was in a position to give it orders appeared positively fantastic.

At length Roger gave up the conundrum as, for the time being, insoluble, and consoled himself with the thought that it was into the hands of the Holy Office, and not into those of the Masons, or their associates the Rosicrucians, that he had fallen. He knew the latter to be quite capable of murder to protect their secrets or achieve their ends, whereas he felt convinced that even a branch of the Holy Office that had been driven underground would never lend itself to actual crime from political motives.

In the more backward Catholic countries the Inquisition was still permitted to carry out public witch-burnings—and for that matter witches were still burnt from time to time by Protestant congregations in Britain, Holland, Sweden and Germany—but the Holy Office had long since given up any attempt to adjudicate on cases other than those which involved a clear charge of sacrilege or heresy. It was such powers they were still striving to retain against the mounting wave of anti-clericalism ; so it stood to reason that, even in secret, they would not risk torturing or killing anyone outside their province, from fear that it might come to light later and provoke a scandal most prejudicial to their whole position.

Roger admitted to himself that at the time, when the Chief Inquisitor had spoken to him of the oubliette and threatened to use torture, he had been badly scared; but now he had had a chance to think things over quietly he felt certain that the hooded spokesman had been bluffing, and simply trying to frighten him into producing the letter without having to resort to further measures which might attract the attention of the police.

In spite of the warmth of the summer night outside it was cold in his cell, and as the chill of the place sent a slight shiver through him he leaned forward to warm his hands at the flame of the candle. While he was doing so they threw huge shadows on the walls and ceiling, and when his hands were warmer he began to amuse himself with the old' children's game of making the shadows into animals' heads by contorting his thumbs and fingers. He had been occupied in this way for about five minutes when he noticed some writing scratched on the wall opposite him low down near the floor. Moving the candle closer he bent to examine it.

The inscription was not cut deeply enough to catch the casual glance, nor was it of the type that take prisoners many weeks of patient toil to carve. It was in German, many of the characters were so badly formed as to be almost illegible, and it had the appearance of having been done hurriedly—perhaps in a single night. Roger's German was good enough for him to understand such words as he could decipher; and it ran, clearly at first, then tailing off into illegibility when the writer had grown tired or weaker, as follows:

May God's vengeance be upon the Grand Orient. I have suffered horribly. Both my legs are broken. They have decreed death for me tonight. I am glad . . . my end. I... to escape them . . . Italy. Carlotta .. . betrayed... Milan ... Florence ...

The inscription ended with two lines in which Roger could not make out a single word, then a signature that looked like "Johannes Kettner" and underneath it a plain cross with the date 10.XI.'88.

Another shiver ran through him, but this time it was not caused by the chill of the cell. The inscription had led him to a terrifying discovery. He was not, as he had supposed, a prisoner of the half-moribund Holy Office, but of the vital and unscrupulous Society of the Grand Orient.

As the unnerving truth flashed upon him de Roubec's puzzling relations with the tribunal were instantly made plain. The Rosicrucians and their kindred secret societies had, in the past quarter of a century, spread from Germany all over the continent. The Due d'Orleans was Grand Master of the Grand Orient in France, so his agent would know where to find its associated Lodge in Florence. A request from the agent of such a high dignitary in the Freemasonic hierarchy would be regarded as an order, so it was no wonder that the hooded men had arranged for the abduction of de Roubec's quarry—as, no doubt, they had acted on the request of some Masonic Master in Germany to abduct and take vengeance on the unfortunate Johannes Kettner.

At the thought of the wretched man lying there, his legs already broken by torture, on the last day of his life, painfully scratching out the inscription while waiting to be dragged to the oubliette, and thrown down it into the dark waters below, Roger felt the perspiration break out on his forehead. And that foul murder had taken place only the previous November—less than six months ago—so everything pointed to the very same hooded men before whom he had stood that night being responsible for it.

As he bent again to verify the date, he found himself staring at the little cross. Had he needed further evidence that he was not in the hands of the Holy Office, there it was. He knew that in every cell of every

Roman Catholic prison, however bare the cell, a crucifix was nailed to one of its walls, but there was not one here. And from what he had read of the Inquisition he knew that behind the tribunal of the Inquisitors a much larger cross, bearing a great ivory figure of Christ, was always in evidence as though to sanctify their deliberations; but there had been no such perverted Use of the emblems of Christianity made by the hooded men. The only cross he had seen in this sinister Florentine dungeon was that scratched by the hand of their condemned prisoner and enemy.

Without a moment's further hesitation he set about readjusting his ideas. The threat to torture and perhaps kill him had not been bluff; it had been made in all seriousness; so any chances he now took would be at his dire peril. Only one thing remained in his favour. Unlike France where people were tending more and more to defy the law, Florence was ruled by a strong and capable sovereign with an efficient secret police at his disposal. Evidently, here, the members of the Grand Orient were frightened of drawing attention to themselves. Therefore they were averse to using strong measures unless forced to it; and, rather than risk an enquiry following his disappearance, were prepared to release him unharmed if he would hand over the Queen's letter.

If he stood out, Isabella might succeed in tracing and rescuing him next day, but, on the other hand, there had always been the possibility that they might find means to lure her from her lodging and abduct her before she could succeed in doing so; and in the light of his recent discovery that was a risk that he was no longer prepared to take. Both for her safety and his own there could be no doubt that the wise thing to do would be to agree to surrender the letter, and so get out of the clutches of the Grand Orient as soon as he possibly could.

It took him no more than a few minutes to reach this new conclusion, and, having resigned himself to it, he endeavoured to keep himself warm by pacing the narrow limits of his cell until he was sent for.

At last the summons came, and he was led back to the vaulted cellar where, behind the long table, the nine black-robed, hooded men sat inscrutable, but for the occasional flash of their cold, malignant eyes. De Roubec was no longer present.

Without preamble, their Chief asked Roger his decision.

Without embroidering matters he gave it.

The silver bell tinkled. Five men entered the room. Four of them were big bullies wearing leather jerkins; the fifth was a little runt of a man with a cast in one eye. They closed round Roger and marched him out of the room in their midst. Outside in the corridor the little man drew a nine-inch stiletto from inside the wide cuff of his coat sleeve, and showing it to Roger, said in most atrocious but fluent French:

"My instructions are clear. I am to accompany you to your lodging and there you will hand me a despatch. Should you attempt to escape on the way, or cheat me when we get there, I am to stick you like a pig with this pretty toy. And do not imagine that I shall be caught after having done so. My men are well practised in covering my escape after such transactions. They have assisted me before, and there have been times when my prisoner has paid with his life for trying to be too clever."

Roger gave a dour nod of understanding and his eyes were then bandaged. He was led up a flight of steps and soon after felt the fresh morning air on his face. Next he was told to step up again and when he had done so was pushed down into the corner seat of a carriage. He could hear the others scrambling in after him, the door slammed and the carriage set off at a gentle trot. As far as he could judge their drive lasted about seven minutes, then the carriage halted and the bandage was removed from his eyes.

He saw that dawn had come but as yet only a few people were in the street or opening their shutters. They were in the via dei Fossi and the carriage had drawn up a few doors away from Pisani's; all five of his captors were crowded into it with him.

The little horror with the wall eye grinned at him and said: "Before we get out I should like to explain my method to you. Two of my men will accompany us inside and the other two will remain here. Should you be so ill advised as to try any tricks when we get upstairs I shall promptly deal with you as I promised. As is usual in the case of people who compel me to make them my victims you will give a scream of agony. The instant the men who are to remain below hear it, one of them will jump from the carriage and run down the street; the other will run after him shouting 'Stop Thief! Stop Thief!' The people in the del Sarte Inglesi will naturally run to their windows instead of to your room. Even should anyone come to your assistance the two men who are with us will prevent their laying hands upon me. I shall then walk quietly out of the house, and in the excitement of the street chase disappear without being noticed."

During the drive Roger had been turning over in his mind the chances of securing help swiftly if, directly he got inside Pisani's house, he turned upon his captors and shouted loudly for assistance. But he now had secretly to admit that, had he been in die little man's shoes, he could not have thought out such an undertaking with a better potential chance of getting clean away. Obviously it would be the height of rashness to play fast and loose with this professional assassin. With a shrug of his shoulders, he got out and, accompanied by three of his captors, walked along to the porch of del Sarte Inglesi.

The door was already open and a bald-headed, baize-aproned porter was busily sweeping down the steps. He wished Roger good morning with barely a glance, and entering the hall the prisoner and his escort went upstairs.

After Isabella had shown Roger her two brass-bound chests in Avignon he had given her the Queen's letter in order that she might keep it locked up in one of them for greater safety; so he now led his captors to her room and knocked upon the door.

Although at this early hour she would normally still have been asleep, her voice came at once, asking who was there; and on his replying he heard her gasp out an exclamation of thankfulness before calling to him to enter.

As he opened the door a crack he saw that she and Maria were both already up and fully dressed. Pushing it wide he walked into the room, followed by the little man and the two bravos.

At the sight of Roger, dirty, dishevelled and in such undesirable company, Isabella gave another gasp. Then, restraining an obvious impulse to run to him and fling her arms around his neck, she stammered:

"Where—where have you been? I—I beg you reassure me that no harm has befallen you."

He gave her a tired smile; then, wishing to say as little as possible in front of his unwelcome companions, replied: "I passed a somewhat uncomfortable night, but I am otherwise quite well. May I trouble you to give me the letter you wot of?"

She gave him a scared, uncertain glance, but on his adding: "Please, Senorita; I require it at once," she turned, knelt down beside her bed, pulled out one of the chests with Maria's help, and unlocked it.

Roger had purposely remained standing just inside the door, so that he and the men at his back were some distance from the bed; and he now saw with relief that as Isabella lifted the lid of the chest her body hid its contents from them, for he had feared that if they caught sight of the valuables inside it they might attempt to rob her.

Closing the chest and relocking it she stood up with the packet in her hands. Again her voice faltered as she said: "Are you—are you sure that you wish me to give this to you now?"

"Yes," he nodded, stepping forward and taking the packet from her. "I will explain later; but I have to give it to these people." Then he thrust it into the hand of the wall-eyed ghoul behind him.

The little man took a quick look at the big red seals bearing the arms of Queen Marie Antoinette, grinned at Roger, made a jerky bow to Isabella, and, signing to his men to leave the room, closed the door gently behind him.

"Oh, what has happened?" Isabella burst out, the second the door was shut. "Surely those evil-looking men were not in the service of the Grand Duke! Why did you make me surrender Her Majesty's letter to them?"

"I was forced to it," Roger replied with a weary shrug. "I have been held captive all right, and escaped with my life only on promising to give up the letter."

"No promise that is extracted under a threat is binding 1" she cried, vehemently. "Why, having succeeded in getting back here, did you not shout for help and put up a fight ?"

"That wall-eyed creature had sworn to kill me if I did."

"That shrimp I" exclaimed Isabella contemptuously.

"He was holding a poniard at my back, and at the first sign that I meant to trick him would have jammed it in my liver."

Roger had temporarily forgotten that his sweet-natured Isabella was a soldier's daughter, but he was swiftly reminded of it as her brown eyes flashed and she cried angrily: "You still wear your sword. Why did you not spring away, draw it and turn upon them? Maria and I would have helped you fight them off, and our shouts would soon have brought assistance."

Suddenly the anger faded from her eyes and they showed only acute distress, as she added bitterly: "Oh, Rojé! Rojé!, You have betrayed the Queen! How could you do so?"

He smiled a little wistfully. "Nay, my sweet; I had the last trump in the pack up my sleeve, and cheated those scoundrels with it at the finish. That was the original cover to the despatch, with Her Majesty's seals upon it; but it contained a letter in her cypher so altered by myself that they will not be able to make head nor tail of it in a month of Sundays."

A sigh of relief escaped her, and she began to stammer an apology for having cast doubt upon his wit and courage. But he begged her to desist; then said unhurriedly:

"We'll have ample time to talk of all this anon. Another matter must engage our attention now. One man at least who is acquainted with your aunt has learnt that you are in Florence. He may not know her well enough to see her frequently, and if he is as fully engaged with his own affairs as I suspect, he may not think the matter of sufficient importance to make a special visit to her. But on the other hand 'tis possible that he may see and mention it to her before the day is out. I do not think we have any cause for immediate anxiety; but, to be on the safe side, the wise course would be for us to bestir ourselves, and make ready to depart this morning."

Isabella showed no surprise, but her thin face was drawn with fear and distress as she listened to him. Then, when he had done, in a spate of words she suddenly shattered his complacency.

"Alas, our case is far worse than you know! De Roubec is in Florence and also knows that I am here. He knocked the house up an hour or so after midnight on pretence of bringing a message from you. Instead he demanded from me a thousand ducats as the price of refrain­ing from telling my aunt that we are living together. When I attempted to fob him off by saying that I had no such sum, he told me to sell some of my jewels as soon as the goldsmiths opened in order to procure it. He left me with an ultimatum, that if I failed to meet him at nine o'clock this morning with the money, outside the west door of the Church of St. Lorenzo, he would go straight to the Palazzo Frescobaldi."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE GRAND DUKE'S MISTRESS

AFTER his sleepless night of acute anxiety, Roger was very tired, but this new and immediate danger spurred his brain to fresh activity.

"I might have guessed it!" he cried bitterly. "De Roubec was present when this other that I spoke of mentioned your relationship to the Frescobaldi; and 'twas too golden an opportunity to attempt black­mail for such a scoundrel to ignore. What answer did you make him?"

"To keep him quiet till nine o'clock, I said I would do my best to raise the money," Isabella sighed. "Yet with so malicious a man, did we produce the gold, I greatly doubt if he would keep his bargain."

"I judge you right in that. His animosity to myself is such that to give him the thousand ducats he demands would be as useless as to cast them down a drain. He will betray us in any case."

She nodded, and choked back a sob. "Through this ill chance I fear our danger is extreme. Unless you would have me forcibly taken from you, we must fly instantly."

"His avarice may save us yet!" Roger said in an attempt to reassure her. "It is not yet seven o'clock. He'll give you a quarter of an hour's grace at least, so 'tis unlikely that he will get to the Frescobaldi Palace before half-past nine. Even if the Contessa has him admitted to her presence without delay it will be ten o'clock by the time she takes any action. If we pack at once, we should get away with the best part of three hours' start."

"We are packed already," Isabella replied. "I have been up all night, half crazy with anxiety about you. Maria did my packing soon after de Roubec left, and before dawn I sent her to rouse Pedro with orders to do yours. I will send her now to order the coach. That also is in readiness; so we can leave as soon as it comes round and you have settled our reckoning."

As Maria left the room Roger took Isabella in his arms, kissed her fondly and murmured: "Blessings upon you, my love, for keeping your beautiful head and showing such forethought. Your family shall not snatch you from me. Have no fear of that. I would rather die than lose you to them."

"But whither shall we go?" she asked. "And what of the Queen's letter? From what you tell me I take it you have the original concealed in your belongings somewhere. If so you are still pledged to deliver it."

Roger had told Isabella nothing of his secret activities on behalf of Mr. Pitt, and he loved her so much that he could not help flushing as he answered with a swift prevarication: "I thought the original too difficult to hide on account of its bulk, so I disposed of it. But before doing so I made the transcript of which I have told you and took a tracing of that. The former was the same bulk as the original, and I made it as a precaution against just such an emergency as has occurred, the latter I have ever since carried sewn up in the buckram lining of my coat-collar. I must, as you say, somehow contrive that it reaches its proper destination safely; and on that account I fear we must part company for a while."

"No! No!" Isabella protested.

"Nay, this time it is yes, my love," he said firmly. " 'Twill not be for long, and our only chance of later securing a lifetime of happiness together. De Roubec's blackguardly attempt to blackmail you has no more than hastened by a few hours the steps we should have been compelled to take in any case, on its becoming known that you are in Florence. I thought the whole matter out in the night; but we have not long together, so listen carefully."

He told her then, as briefly as he could, of the attack upon him and of his abduction; of the hooded men and of what had passed at their tribunal. When he came to the episode which concerned her personally he repeated the actual words, as far as he could remember them, that he had used in explaining why she had come with him to Florence instead of sailing direct to Naples; then he went on:

"So, you see, if what I said is reported to the Contessa Frescobaldi she will have no grounds for supposing that you are running away with me. And if, as I said we intended to do, we part company this morning, it will further confirm her in the belief that there is nothing between us. There is even a fair chance that such lies as de Roubec may tell will be discounted; and should your aunt still fear that I may have seduced you, but is led to believe that I have left you for good, what action can she take that would in any way benefit you or your family? If she thinks that of your own free will you are proceeding on your way to Naples to get married, ft would be pointless to send in pursuit of you and haul you back to Florence. More, if she is a woman of any sense she will realize that the less attention that is drawn to your brief stay here and possible lapse from virtue, the better. So I have hopes that she will threaten de Roubec with the wrath of the Frescobaldi unless he holds his tongue, and as far as we are concerned let sleeping dogs lie."

Isabella nodded. "There is much shrewdness in your reasoning, my clever one. Very well then; I will do as you wish. But when and where will you rejoin me ?"

Much relieved by her acquiescence, Roger proceeded with the unfolding of his plan. "The road to Naples goes inland from Florence, and only turns south when it has rounded the mountains to the east of the city. About ten miles along it lies a small township called Pontassieve. Go thither at a normal pace and take rooms there. I shall remain here for a few hours, as I intend to buy riding horses on which we will later make our way back by a circuitous route to Leghorn. But I hope to rejoin you soon after midday, and we will then discuss our further plans in detail."

At the thought that he would be with her again so soon, she bright­ened. Then, after a moment, she said: "To purchase horses you will require money."

He nodded. "It would not come amiss; as to buy good ones, and the pack-mules we shall require as well, the outlay will be considerable."

Kneeling down she unlocked her money-chest again, and took from it a hundred of the big gold pieces. He protested that it was far too much, and that he still had considerable funds of his own. But she insisted on his taking the full hundred in case, while separated from her, he needed a large sum for some unforeseen emergency.

She had scarcely relocked the chest when Maria returned to say that the coach was below, and a few moments later Pedro and Hernando came in to carry down the baggage.

While they were about it Signor Pisani appeared on the scene, still in his chamber-robe and much agitated by these signs of unannounced departure. But the fat landlord was soon pacified by Roger explaining matters on the grounds that Madame Jules had had news by a messenger who had knocked her up in the middle of the night that her husband was seriously ill in Naples, and she naturally wished to get to his bedside at the earliest possible moment. He added that as his own business in Florence was not yet completed he would be staying on for another night or more; after which he would be returning to France via Leghorn. Then he produced a few of Isabella's Spanish gold pieces and asked Pisani to change them for him, deduct the amount of the bill, and let him have it with the balance in Tuscan money when he returned in the course of an hour or so.

When Pisani left them to get the money changed, and the servants had gone downstairs with the last of the baggage, Roger and Isabella snatched a quick embrace. He made her repeat the name of the township where she was to wait for him, told her that to conform to his plan she should take rooms there in her own name, and swore that nothing should prevent him rejoining her at latest by the afternoon. Then he accompanied her to her coach. In the presence of Pisani's people he took leave of her in a manner suited to either a brother-in-law or close friend, shook hands with Quetzal, and said good-bye to her servants as though he did not expect to see them again.

As soon as the coach was out of sight he set off down the street. After a few enquiries he found a man who understood him sufficiently to direct him to a horse-dealer. There, after a short delay, an apothecary who could speak a little French was fetched from a nearby shop to act as interpreter; and with his aid Roger looked over the dealer's stock. For himself he settled on a grey gelding with strong shoulders and an easy pace, for Isabella a brown mare that he felt confident would please her; and, feeling certain that she would refuse to leave Quetzal behind with her servants, he bought a fat little pony for the boy. Having added two sleek mules to his string, he then got the apothecary to take him round to a saddler's, where he purchased all the necessary equip­ment for his animals, including two pairs of panniers for the mules.

Not wishing to let the apothecary know too much of his business, after arranging for the saddlery to be sent round to the horse-dealer's, he thanked and left him; then he found his own way back to the Lungarno Corsini where the best shops were situated.

There, he hired a porter with a barrow to follow him and collect his purchases as he made them. With Isabella's slim figure and Quetzal's small one in his eye he bought two complete outfits of boys' clothing. Then he set about choosing a new hat, cloak and coat for himself. The first two were easy, as his only requirement was that they should be a different shape and colour from those he had been wearing; but the selection of the last called for a certain niceness of judgment. It had to be a garment in which he would appear suitably dressed to pay a social call in the evening, yet at the same time one which was not too ornate for him to wear in the daytime. Fortunately the Italian sunshine lent itself far better to such a compromise than the uncertain weather of northern Europe would have done; and he settled on a long-skirted coat of rich red brocade. When he had done, with the porter behind him, he made his way back to Pisani's.

It still lacked a few minutes to nine; but, all the same, he now approached del Sarte Inglesi with some trepidation. He had little fear that de Roubec had as yet set the Frescobaldi on to him, but felt that at any time he might be in fresh danger from the Grand Orient.

When he made the copy of Madame Marie Antoinette's letter with the jumbled cypher in Paris he had had in mind the possibility of its being stolen from him, and no attempt being made to decipher it until it reached His Highness of Orleans, perhaps many days later. But it seemed a fair assumption that any such secret society as that of the hooded men would be sufficiently curious to learn what the Queen had written to her brother to investigate the contents of the despatch before handing it over to d'Orleans' agent. And Roger felt there was an un­pleasant possibility that, when they found they could not read it, they might endeavour to get him into their clutches again in the hope that he might know the cypher, and could be forced to interpret it for them. It was fear of this that had caused him to devote so much time during the night to a fruitless endeavour to devise a way of getting out of their hands without surrendering any document at all, instead of deciding right away to fob them off with the one in which he had altered the cypher.

While he thought it unlikely that he would be attacked in open day­light in the street, there was at least a possibility that the little wall­eyed assassin and his men had returned by now to del Sarte Inglesi, menaced Pisani into silence, and were waiting upstairs in their late captive's room ready to pounce on him when he got back. Therefore, instead of going into the house, he remained outside it and sent the porter to fetch Pisani. When the landlord appeared Roger said to him:

"This morning I have had a great stroke of good luck. Ten minutes ago I ran into the very man who can settle my business for me. I am to meet him again to conclude matters in half an hour's time, so I shall be able to set off at midday by post-chaise to Leghorn. I am going round to the post-house to order a conveyance now, and as I have this porter at my disposal he might as well wheel my baggage round there at once and be done with it. My things are already packed, as in the excitement this morning my sister-in-law's servants made the error of thinking that I should be going south with her. Would you be good enough to have them brought down to me?"

The Tuscan scratched one of his large ears, expressed regret that he was losing his lodger so soon, and went back into the house. A few minutes later Roger's things were carried out and piled on to the barrow, and Pisani returned with his bill and the change from the money that had been given him. Only then could Roger be sure that his fears of a second ambush already having been laid for him were ground­less ; but, all the same, he felt that he had been wise to take precautions.

After leaving a generous donation for the servants and bidding Pisani a warm farewell, Roger signed to his porter to follow him down the street; but instead of going to the post-house he led the way back to the horse-dealer's. There, he had his valise and purchases loaded into the panniers of one of his mules, mounted his grey, and taking the long rein on which he had had the other four animals strung together rode out of the dealer's yard. At a walking pace he led his string cautiously through the narrow and now crowded streets until he reached the Arno, then he took the road that Isabella's coach had followed earlier that morning, and by it left the city.

His way lay along the north bank of the river, and as he proceeded at a gentle trot he suddenly realized with delight where the early Florentine painters had found their landscapes. Florence now lay behind him set in her bowl of hills, and before his eyes were the very river, green meadows, occasional trees and castle-topped slopes that they had used for the backgrounds of their Madonnas.

At once his thoughts turned to the picture that Isabella had bought for him, and from it to her. He had taken every precaution he could think of to cover their projected disappearance, but he knew that his measures had not been altogether watertight. Pisani and his servants could only inform an enquirer that she had left early that morning in her coach for Naples, and that he had departed a few hours later by post-chaise for Leghorn; but if the enquirer pursued his investigations at the post-house he would learn that no one whose description tallied with that of Roger had been booked out. It was also possible that the horse-dealer, the apothecary or the porter might talk of the foreign gentleman with whom they had had dealings that morning; but even if they did, he thought it unlikely that the sleuths of either the Grand Orient or the Frescobaldi would pick up and co-ordinate such scraps of casual gossip in so large a city as Florence.

One thing it had been impossible to cover up was the fact that Isabella had lodged at del Sarte Inglesi as Madame Jules de Breuc, and he now realized that when the Frescobaldi learned that it would lend colour to de Roubec's allegation of her fall from virtue. Another was that Isabella and he had left Florence within a few hours of one another, although ostensibly in different directions; so her relatives might suspect the truth—that their separation was nothing but a ruse, and that later they meant to reunite at some prearranged rendezvous.

If they did suspect, it was possible that they might follow her, thinking that they would catch her with her seducer. But Roger had already made allowances for such a pursuit and felt that he had ample time to prevent it leading to disaster; as, once he had arranged matters with Isabella, he meant to take adequate precautions against their being surprised together. And if the Frescobaldi found her alone he thought it highly improbable that they would prevent her going on to Naples.

So, although he was not altogether free from anxiety, he was no longer seriously perturbed about the future, and considered his chances excellent of getting Isabella safely to Leghorn and so to England.

Although, during their month together, he had told her a great deal about his home and country they had never gone into the actual details of the life they meant to live there. Somehow there had always seemed so many pleasant or urgent things to occupy his immediate attention that he had never given it serious thought.

As he began to do so now. he realized with a pang that marriage might mean his having to give up his work for Mr. Pitt. To forgo the travel and excitement that had already become second nature to him would be a sad blow, but he could not see himself being content to leave Isabella behind in England for many months at a stretch while he was abroad on secret missions. However, by marriage Isabella would become an Englishwoman. She was intelligent, girted, high-born and entirely trustworthy; so, if given the opportunity, could be of the most valuable assistance to him in such work. But would the aloof, woman-shy Prime Minister agree to his engaging her in it ? That was the rub. If he did they could have a marvellous life together. They would move in the best society of the European capitals and meet all the most interesting people; yet remain immune from becoming bored by the idle round owing to their fascinating task of uncovering State secrets.

But what if Mr. Pitt could not be persuaded to agree to such a programme? Well, there was the possibility of going into Parliament. Only a few months previously his father had suggested that he should do so, and had offered to put up the necessary funds out of the big prize-money that had come to him as a result of the last war. Mr. Pitt would, he felt confident, find him a good constituency to contest at the next election, and having married the daughter of a Prime Minister and Grandee of Spain would add greatly to his social prestige.

The prospect now seemed rather a thrilling one. He knew himself to be a fluent speaker and began to make mental pictures of Mr. Roger Brook, M.P., swaying the House in some important debate, so that he saved a Government measure by a few votes, and in this new role earned the thanks of the master he so much admired. After such a triumph what fun it would be to come home and give Isabella a designedly modest account of the matter, then witness her surprise and delight when she read eulogies of her husband's great performance in the news-sheets next day.

They would live in London, of course, but they must have a house with a garden. In spite of his love of gaiety and city lights Roger was a countryman at heart. And a garden would be nice for the children to play in. He felt sure that Isabella would want children, and although, having no young brothers, sisters, nephews or nieces, he had had little to do with children himself, he regarded them as the best means of ensuring a happy married life.

He wondered for how long he would be faithful to Isabella, and judged that it would not be much over a year. In his day, age and station it was a great exception for a man to remain a "Benedict" longer, and few wives expected more of their husbands. But such affairs could be conducted either with brutal openness or in the manner of the French, with courtesy and discretion. Isabella, he knew, was very prone to jealousy, so he would take every possible precaution to protect her from unhappiness. There would probably be the very devil of a row when she first found out that he had been unfaithful to her, but if he was firm about it that should clear the air for good. And he certainly meant to be, as he had been brought up in the tradition that man is polygamous by nature and therefore enjoys special rights. Like other women she would soon come to accept that, and after a few trying weeks of tears and complaints they would settle down into enduring contentment together.

But why anticipate the inevitable reaction of satiated passion when the passion itself was still to come ? They had only the two days' journey to Leghorn, then they would be out of all danger. With any luck they should reach England before the end of the month. No doubt Isabella and his mother would insist on a week or two in which to make prepara­tions for a proper wedding. Those extra weeks would be a sore trial, as he was already boiling over with suppression; but he would manage to get through them somehow. Then at last would come the fulfilment of the rosy dreams which had been tormenting him ever since Isabella had kissed him in the coach. While still dwelling on the joys of being separated from his beloved neither by day nor night, he approached Pontassieve. But he did not enter it.

The fields in that part of Italy were not separated by hedges, as in England, but only low ditches, so it was easy for him to leave the road and lead his string of animals across to the river. There, he let them have a drink, then when they had done led them along the bank, through the fields again, and so back to the road some way beyond the town.

Continuing along it for a little, he examined such scattered buildings as came in view with a critical eye until, on rounding a bend in the road, he saw just the sort of place for which he was looking. It was a good-sized farmhouse with a yard and some big barns, set well off the high­way. Riding up to the door, he shouted: "Hello there I" several times, until a middle-aged woman came round from the back of the house to him.

Dismounting, he smiled at her, and putting his hand in his fob pocket produced a gold half-sequin. He knew that neither of them would be able to understand one word the other said, but he also knew that his smiles and his money were worth a mint of talk. She returned his smile, then her eyes swiftly focused on the small piece of gold in his palm.

Without more ado he gave it to her, hitched his grey to a post near the door, then beckoned her to follow him, and led the way with the rest of his string round to the yard. A man was working there and at a word from the woman he took over the animals. Roger watched him stable them, then he unloaded the panniers of the mule, and the two of them carried his various packages round to the house door for him.

Inside, it was, as he had expected, a poor place, but the beaten earth floor of the living-room was moderately clean; and, undoing his sleeping-roll, he laid it out in one corner, indicating by gestures that he meant to sleep there. Next, he unpacked his new suit, and by the same means conveyed that he was about to change into it; upon which, with nods and smiles of understanding, the couple left him.

When he had put on clean linen, he redressed his hair with the aid of his travelling-mirror, then wriggled into the red brocade coat; but before repacking his old one he slit the end of its stiff collar and drew out the tracing paper with the involved cypher into which he had transcribed the Queen's letter.

Calling the couple in he took out his watch, pointed to the figure ten upon it, shrugged his shoulders, and moved his finger-tip in a circle nearly twice round the dial to finish on seven. He meant to indicate that he would be back either that night or the following morning, but from their blank faces he concluded that they did not know how to tell the time by a watch. However, he thought it probable that they had made occasional visits to Florence, as the city lay within ten miles of the farm, so would have seen the clocks in the buildings there, and realize that he meant to return in the fairly near future. He then showed them two more half-sequins, put them back in his pocket, mounted his grey and,-with a friendly wave of the hand, rode off towards Pontassieve.

He had told Isabella not to expect him before midday, so that she should not be worried if his arrangements took him longer than he anticipated; but everything had gone so smoothly that when he dis­mounted in front of the solitary inn it was still a few minutes before eleven.

Tired as she was from her sleepless night, her anxiety had kept her from going to bed until he rejoined her, and she was sitting in a chair dozing at an upper window. The sound of his horse's hoofs roused her at once, and with a cry of delight she ran downstairs to welcome him.

After he had assured her that all had gone well, and handed his grey over to the ostler, he accompanied her inside, and said:

"My love, you look sadly in need of sleep, but I fear I must keep you up for yet a while, as I have much to say, and much to do before the day is out; so it is best that we should settle on our final plans without delay."

"In spite of the fine new coat you are wearing, you, too, look near exhausted," she said solicitously. "Have you yet eaten, or shall I order something to be prepared for you ?"

"Nay. I pray you do not bother them to cook a roast for me; but I could do with a light repast if it be handy."

She took his arm. "Come up to my room then. There is a bowl of fresh fruit there and you can eat some of it while we talk."

When they reached her chamber Quetzal was playing there, but except for smiling at Roger he took no notice of them, and they settled themselves in chairs near the window.

"What is the meaning of your new suit and your hair being done differently?" she asked, as she handed him the bowl of fruit.

He smiled. "The coat does not fit me as well as I could wish, but 'tis a fine, rich piece of stuff. With my old one I put off my French identity and have become again Mr. Roger Brook. When compelled to play such a game as we are at the moment, 'tis a considerable asset to be able to pass at will for a man of either nationality."

"What do you hope to gain by this sudden metamorphosis?"

Roger sighed; then on his old principle of taking the worst hurdle first, he said: "Should I chance to come into view of anyone who knows me, I hope to escape recognition unless they see me at close quarters. You see, my love, within the hour I have to return to Florence."

Isabella dropped her reticule with a thud; her heavy eyebrows drew together and tears started to her big brown eyes, but he hurried on:

"You must surely realize that as yet I have had no opportunity to deliver this letter of the Queen's that is proving such a millstone round our necks. And from your attitude this morning I know the last thing you would suggest is that I should abandon all attempt to do so."

She nodded unhappily, and he continued:

"This, then, is what I propose to do. On our first arrival in Florence Pisani told me that the Grand Duke sups with the opera singer Donna Livia most nights of the week except Fridays and Sundays. As today is Thursday, and his religious scruples will cause him to observe to­morrow's fast in his amours, as well as other matters, the odds are all upon him seeking the embraces of his favourite mistress tonight. By hook or by crook I mean to gain admission to her presence, disclose to her the secret reason for my journey to Florence, and beg her aid in delivering the letter."

"How long, think you, will it be before you can get back?" Isabella asked, with an effort to keep out of her voice her distress at the thought of him leaving her again.

"It depends upon the hour at which His Highness goes to Donna Livia's house. Now that we are in the long days of the year he may do so before sunset. If that proves the case I may be able to get back tonight. But I greatly doubt it. 'Tis hardly likely that he would sup with her till eight o'clock, and the gates of the city are closed at sundown; so 'tis much more probable that I shall be compelled to remain within its walls till morning. If so, I shall leave at dawn and should be back soon after seven. But either way my plan precludes my seeing you again until tomorrow."

"Why so, if you get back tonight?" she exclaimed in surprise.

"Because on my return I do not propose to come to the inn. I mean to go to the lemon-coloured farmhouse with the red roof, that lies to the right of the road some half mile further on after having passed through Pontassieve. You may have noticed that I arrived from that direction."

"I did; and wondered at it."

"Well, I have already made certain arrangements with the owners of the place. If my business in Florence is concluded before sundown I shall sleep at the farm tonight. If not they will give me breakfast when I arrive in the morning. Then, at let us say half-past eight, I want you to join me there."

"I do not yet see the object of all this mystification."

Roger bit into his second plum. "Believe me, dear one, our best chance of escaping further trouble lies in our playing out our piece in this way. I should not have come here at all today had you not had to leave Florence so hurriedly, thus denying us the opportunity for a full concerting of our plans. If de Roubec has told his story to your aunt, by this time she will believe me to be your lover. The odds are that she is now enquiring about us in the city. We dare not ignore the possibility that she may send someone after you. 'Tis for that reason I must make myself scarce as soon as possible."

Isabella gave him a scared glance. "Think you then that she will have me pursued ?"

He took-her hand and pressed it reassuringly. "I am in hopes that, believing you to be on your way to Naples, she will think it pointless to do so; but she may wish to assure herself that I have not rejoined you."

"If she despatches riders along the road to Naples, 'tis certain they will enquire here, learn that I am within, and also that you have been with me."

"I know it, and am not unduly perturbed at such a possibility. For me to have snatched this apparently last chance of being with you for a few hours is quite understandable. The important thing is that if they do make enquiries here they should also learn that I have returned to Florence. If they find you alone they can have no excuse for making trouble, and I feel that we can count on them returning to your aunt with a report that she no longer has cause to be concerned for your reputation. But, lest some spy is left to loiter near this inn, I think it essential to the completion of the deception that you should give the appearance of resuming your journey to Naples tomorrow morning."

"And what then?"

"I shall be awaiting you at the farmhouse. There I already have a horse for you, a pony for Quetzal and two baggage-mules to carry your treasure-chests and other most valuable possessions. I also bought a lad's clothes for you and a boy's for Quetzal. When you have changed into them, we will send your coach on its way and ourselves, by a devious route so as to avoid Florence, ride to Leghorn."

"But Rojé!" she gasped. "Do you mean that I must part with all my servants?"

He had overlooked the possibility that, never having been without several people to do her bidding, she might take the loss of her retinue hard; but he restrained his impatience and said gently:

"My love. Your coach cannot go by bridle-paths or across fields as can mules and horses; so since it must remain on the road there is no alternative to its going forward. Were it to turn back and any agent of either your aunt or the Grand Orient chance to see it and your liveried servants passing through Florence, that would give away the fact that you are not on the road to Naples after all; just as surely as it would if anyone who knows Quetzal to be your page saw him with us in his Indian costume. Besides, as I have told you, when we are married we shall not be able to afford to keep several men-servants, so it would be no bad thing if you begin to accustom yourself to doing without them now. I pray you, in order to make more certain our escape to happiness, to give them each a handsome present tomorrow morning and send them back to your father."

"I'll do so with the men, since you desire it," she said after a moment. "But I must keep Maria. I could not even dress myself without her."

Again he had to restrain his impatience. But, having on numerous occasions indulged in the fascinating pastime of assisting young women to undress themselves, he knew quite a lot about the complicated systems of hooks and eyes that fastened their dresses at the back, and of the efforts required to tight-lace them again into their corsets. So he said:

"Take her if you must, then; but it will mean the sacrifice of a certain amount of your baggage, as she will have to ride on one of the mules."

For a further twenty minutes they discussed details of their pro­jected journey to Leghorn; then he went to the stairs and called for his horse. While it was being saddled they took another fond but temporary farewell of one another. After urging her to go to bed and get some of the sleep that she needed so badly, he went down to the street, mounted his grey and set off back to Florence.

In spite of his fatigue, now that he no longer had a string to lead he made better time than he had on the outward journey; and at a quarter-past one he pulled up outside Meggot's English hotel.

The porter there said that he did not think they had a room vacant, but that if Roger would be pleased to wait for a moment he would find out from Mr. Meggot.

Having arrived unattended by a servant, Roger had expected some such reception, as he had learned in casual conversation with Pisani that Mr. Meggot always had rooms to spare, but was the greatest snob on earth, and kept them empty rather than admit- to his hotel anyone who was not of the first quality. He had even been known to turn away a Countess, because she had been divorced. But Roger felt quite capable of dealing with such a situation; so he threw the reins of his grey to a groom, told the porter to take his valise, and followed him inside.

The portly Mr. Meggot emerged from a small office, cast a swift eye over Roger, noted the imperfect fit of his coat, and said coldly: "I fear that we are very full just now, sir; but my porter omitted to tell me your name."

"My name is Brook," replied Roger with extreme hauteur.

"Brook," repeated Mr. Meggot a little dubiously; but, evidently impressed by Roger's manner, he added: "Would you by chance happen to be one of the Shropshire Brooks?"

"No," said Roger, assuming a tone of bored indifference. "I am of the Hampshire branch. My father is Admiral Brook, and my mother, Lady Marie, is sister to the Earl of Kildonan. Since his lordship travels much in Italy it is possible that he has honoured your establishment from time to time. But why do you ask?"

Immediately Mr. Meggot became all smiles and obsequiousness. "Only, sir, because I feel it my duty to have a care who mingles with my other guests. Our Ambassador, Lord Hervey, does me the honour to dine here quite frequently, and I should not like to put His Ex­cellency in the position of having to meet anyone who—er—well, anyone who was not quite—you understand. At the moment we have with us the Earl Fitzwilliam, who is no doubt known to you, Lord Hume and his charming sister the Honourable Mrs...."

"Quite, quite!" Roger interrupted. "But have you a room for me?"

"Of course, Mr. Brook. Of course. Come this way, if you please. I know your uncle well. He often spent a night here on his way to attend King James in Rome. He was not truly King, of course; but many of the Scots nobility like your uncle continued to regard him as such until his death last year. I always found Lord Kildonan a most gracious nobleman—most gracious. He once said to me.."

Again Roger cut the garrulous Mr. Meggot short. "In the last twenty-four hours I have ridden far, and I have to wait upon His Highness the Grand Duke this evening. So I wish to go to bed at once and be called at five this afternoon. Kindly arrange for that."

"Certainly, Mr. Brook, certainly. No doubt, then, you would like a bath. I will have the maids bring you up cans of hot water while you undress."

Eor Roger that lovely English touch outweighed all Mr. Meggot's pomposity, and dropping his curt, supercilious manner he accepted the offer with alacrity. Half an hour later, still rosy from his warm ablutions, he slipped between a pair of Mr. Meggot's fine Irish linen sheets, and almost instantly was sound asleep.

"When he was called he got up reluctantly, but nevertheless felt much refreshed. While he had slept one of the hotel valets bad made some slight alterations to his new coat, so that it should fit Better, and now came to assist him to dress. He put on white silk stockings and his best silk breeches, had his hair freshly dressed and powdered, scented himself lavishly, stuck a beauty patch on his cheek and hung his quizzing glass round his neck. So when he went downstairs at six o'clock with his hat under his arm he presented a sight guaranteed to gladden the heart of any young woman, and received a glance of deferential approval from Mr. Meggot.

Having asked that worthy for writing materials he then sat down an4 wrote the following note in careful copperplate, so that the English in which it was written should be easily legible to a foreigner who. might know only a little of that language:

Mr. Gilbert Courtnay, director of His Majesty’s Opera House, Hay-market, London, presents his compliments to the Lady Livia Gallichini.

To Mr. Courtnay's regret his present journey permits him to stay for only one night in Florence, but, even on passing through this illustrious city, he cannot deny, himself the pleasure of laying his homage at, the feet of the talented lady who now, more than any other, perpetuates its ancient lustre.

If the Lady Livia would deign to receive Mr. Court/nay for a few moments he would count that the most distinguished honour of his passage through Italy.

On his ten-mile ride back from Pontassieve earlier in the day Roger had given his whole mind to. the problem of how he might most easily gain swift; access to Donna Livia, and the note he had just written was the result of hip cogitations. He thought it very unlikely that the prima donna would refuse to receive a director of the London Opera, and that even if the Grand Duke were already with her she would ask his per­mission to have-such a visitor sent up.

All the same, he was by no means happy about the identity he had decided to assume. For one thing, while it was. not uncommon j for men of his age to be Members of Parliament or hold field-officer's rank in the Army, he greatly doubted if anyone as young as himself had ever been the director of a Royal Opera Company. For another, although like every educated person of his time he spent a fair portion of his leisure listening to music, it had never been a passion with him, and he knew practically nothing of its technicalities. If he found Donna Livia alone that would not matter, but if circumstances compelled him to put up a bluff that he was conversant with the works of all the leading composers, it might prove extremely awkward. But, with his usual optimism, he thrust such misgivings into the back of his mind, had a carozza summoned, and drove in it to Donna Livia's house.

As he knew that one of the fashionable recreations of Florentine ladies was holding conversazioni, he thought it quite possible that he would find her so engaged. But, on enquiring, he learned that she was not receiving, so he gave his note and a silver ducat to the footman who had answered the door to him.

For a few minutes he waited in a hall floored with chequered squares of black and white marble; then the footman returned and ushered him through a pair of fine wrought-iron gates, beyond which were heavily brocaded curtains, into a spacious salon.

There were five people in it, but there was no mistaking which one of them was Donna Livia. She was reclining on a lion-headed day-bed in a loose white robe with a silver, key pattern border, and in the first glance Roger decided that he had rarely seen a more beautiful woman. Evidently she was proud of her luxuriant Titian hair, as she wore it unpowdered. Her cheeks and jowl were just a shade on the heavy side, but her green eyes were magnificent, her forehead broad, her nose straight, her mouth a full-lipped cupid's bow and her teeth, as she smiled a welcome at him, two perfectly even rows of dazzling whiteness.

Her companions were two middle-aged ladies of aristocratic mien, a very old one who sat dozing in a rocking-chair in a far corner of the room, and an elderly cherub-faced man. The latter was holding Roger's note and immediately addressed him in indifferent English.

"The Lady Livia say verri much pleasure you come, sir. But she no speek Inglish. She have only Italian an' German. You speek some per'aps ?"

Roger was much relieved, as he spoke fairly fluent German; and, having kissed the plump hand that Donna Livia extended to him, he thanked her in that language for receiving him.

She then introduced the two ladies, whom he gathered were both Marchesas, although he did not catch their names, and the plump man as Signor Babaroni, master of the Grand Duke's ballet. The old woman she ignored. Having made his bows, Roger was given a chair and, as he had feared would be the case if he found Donna Livia with company, the conversation at once turned to opera.

Fortunately for him, Signor Babaroni spoke no German and only one of the ladies understood it; the other spoke some English, and asked him if he talked French; but he promptly denied all knowledge of it, so was able to confine himself to two languages and thus be open to his remarks being challenged by no more than two of them at one time.

On Donna Livia asking him what operas were now being performed in London, he said that at the time of his leaving they were giving Bianchi's La VillaneUa Rapita; as it so happened that he had taken Isabella to see that piece while they were in Marseilles.

She then enquired his opinion of Bianchi and he replied that he considered La Villanella Rapita by no means that composer's best work.

It was a shot in the dark and, apparently, not a very good one, as Donna Livia gave him a slightly surprised look. Moreover, it immedi­ately produced the question: "Then to which of his operas, Miester Courtnay, would you give the palm?"

This completely bowled him out, as before his visit to Marseilles he had never head of the composer. But for the moment he saved himself from exposure by his wits; although he flushed to the eyebrows as he said: "To whichever one you might lift from the rut by singing in it, gracious lady. . . ."

Pleased by the compliment she smilingly repeated it to her friends in Italian. Then she asked him where he had heard her sing, and in what part

This was infinitely worse than anything he had expected, and he had all he could do to hide his dismay; but he punted for Milan, that being the safest bet he could think of, and for Scarlatti's Telemaco as a classic in which she must have played on many occasions.

Again he seemed to have saved his bacon, as she did not declare that he could never have done so; but remarked that he must have travelled in Italy when he was scarcely more than a boy, as His Highness had not allowed her to leave Tuscany since her first season in Florence.

To that he promptly replied: "My lady; people are often deceived at a first meeting by my youthful appearance; but I vow that I could give you two years for every year you are over twenty."

As it seemed impossible that he could be anywhere near thirty the remark inferred that she could hardly be more than twenty-four, and as in fact she was twenty-eight, he had succeeded in paying her another pretty compliment.

Acutely anxious now to avoid further questions on the subject of music, he hardly gave her time to smile before rushing into a panegyric on the beauties of Florence and its art treasures.

Here he was on safer ground, but after he had been speaking with glowing enthusiasm for a few moments on the masterpieces in the Pitti, she said:

"But I thought, Miester Courtnay, that you were only passing through Florence? You speak as though you had been here several days, and if that is so, I take it ill of you that you should have waited almost till the moment of your departure before coming to see me."

Hastily he bridged the pitfall he had inadvertently dug for himself, by assuring her that his sight-seeing had been limited to a few hours during that afternoon. But the statement cut the safe ground from under his feet; as, after it, he dared not develop the conversation as he had intended, by talking of the Duomo, the Badia, the house in which Bianca Capella had lived,, and other places of interest in the city.

Signor Babaroni seized Roger's pause to say in his halting English that as a young man he had visited London and heard the great Francesca de l'Epine sing at Drury Lane.

Roger showed suitable awe although he had never heard of this long-dead prima donna. The ballet master then revealed that his father had done much to ease the last years of her equally famous English rival, Mrs. Katherine Tofts, who had eventually gone mad and died in Venice. As he translated his remarks for the benefit of the ladies the conversation was soon back to opera and the individual triumphs of great artists past and present.

Gamely Roger strove to keep his end up, by putting in a remark here and there that he could only hope was suitable. He was now heartily cursing himself for his folly in having adopted his new role; but as one of the Marchesas spoke German he dared not tell Donna Livia that he had got in to her on false pretences and was anxious to talk to her on a private matter. Yet every moment he feared that he would make some hopeless gaffe that would reveal him beyond all question as an impostor.

At length his hostess provided him with a welcome respite, by saying: "No doubt, Miester Courtnay, like so many Englishmen you are interested in gardens. Would you care to see mine ?"

With almost indecent haste, he jumped at the proposal; so, lan­guidly rising from her couch, she signed to the others to remain where they were, and led him to the far end of the room.

It gave on to a verandah of beautifully scrolled ironwork from which sprouted gilded lilies, the outer edge of its roof being supported by a row of slender rose-coloured pillars of Verona marble, crowned with arcanthus-leaf capitols carved in white stone. Beyond it lay the garden, which was actually no more than a big yard enclosed by high walls; but it contained a lovely fountain surrounded by small Cyprus trees, an arbour, stone seats of delicate design, camellia and magnolia bushes, and many delightful rock plants in the interstices of its stone paving.

As they were descending the steps from the verandah she said softly: "For the director of a Royal Opera Company you know singu­larly little about music, Miester Courtnay; and I thought it best to take you away from them before you made some fatal slip."

Her friendly, conspiratorial air made him sigh with relief, and he replied with a smile: "I will confess, my lady, that I was on tenterhooks, as I did not seek admittance to your presence to talk of opera, but of a very different subject."

In a glance her magnificent green eyes swept him from head to foot, then came to rest upon his deep-blue ones. She did not seek to conceal her appreciation of his handsome looks and fine bearing; and with a wicked little smile, she said:

"Few women could fail to be flattered by the attentions of such a beau as yourself; but you are a very rash young man. None of my Florentine admirers would dare to practise such an imposture. They would be much too frightened that discovery of it would land them in prison, as the victims of His Highness's wrath."

Instantly Roger was seized with a new apprehension. He saw that he had jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire. Clearly the beautiful Donna Livia now thought that he was so desperately in love with her that he had risked imprisonment for the chance of pouring out his passion at her feet. How was she going to take it when he confessed that he had come to see her only on a matter of business? But without waiting for a reply, she turned back towards the house, and said:

"Such audacious gallantry reminds one of an old romance, and is worthy of at least some reward. I am inclined to give it to you, so I will get rid of these people and you shall tell me about your real self."

More worried than ever by the turn matters had taken, Roger followed her inside. There she spoke to her other guests in Italian, and as they took their leave Signor Babaroni said to him:

"I doubts verri much eef 'is 'ighness consent to a London season for 'is company. But I much like to veesit London again; so I wish you most well."

Quick to realize the excuse Donna Livia had made to talk with him alone, Roger thanked the ballet master politely and said that he had good hopes of arranging matters, but had naturally felt it proper to ascertain the inclinations of the prima donna before proceeding further.

When they had gone the beautiful Tuscan resumed her indolent pose on the day-bed and beckoned Roger to a seat beside her. Knowing that, sooner or later, he must show himself in his true colours, he decided that he had better do so before she had any further opportunity to give proof of the favour with which she evidently regarded him, and so spare her an increased embarrassment when he disclosed that he was not in love with her. Approaching the thorny subject as tactfully as possible, he said:

"Gracious lady; first I must tell you that my real name is Roger Brook, and that I come not from England but from France. While there I had the honour to be entrusted with a commission by Queen Marie Antoinette, and it is that which has brought me to Florence. I bear a secret despatch from Her Majesty to His Highness, and certain of Her Majesty's enemies have resorted to most desperate measures in the hope of preventing its delivery. I beg that you will not think too hardly of me when I admit that it was to seek your aid in completing my mission that I resorted to my recent imposture."

For a moment her green eyes narrowed and her arched brows drew together; then she laughed.

"After such a blow to my pride I suppose I ought to show a sad confusion, or by a cold detachment endeavour to pretend that the thoughts to which I so recently gave expression had never entered my head. But having admitted that your looks pleased me, why should I now deny it ? Call me a bold, forward creature if you will; but whatever the reason for your coming, I am glad you came."

On such a handsome admission Roger could do no less than his best to restore her amour propre, so he smiled at her and murmured: "I count it my misfortune now that my entry here was not inspired by sentiments more delicate than the delivering of a letter to another. For I have never seen a lady to gain whose favours I would more willingly risk a prison."

"I thank you, Miester Brook. Your manners match your looks. But a truce to compliments. In what way can I serve you?"

" 'Tis said that His Highness sups here several times a week. If he proposes to do so tonight, and you would do me the great kindness to present me to him on his coming, I could then deliver this letter to him personally."

She nodded. "That I will do with pleasure, but he will not arrive before ten o'clock, and 'tis as yet not seven."

"I am indeed grateful, Donna Livia. May I take it then that I have your permission to return at ten?"

For a moment she considered the matter, then her eyes became mischievous. "Why should you not remain here till he comes? You can have no idea what a pleasant change it is for me to talk with a personable man alone."

"Is His Highness so jealous, then?" Roger asked with a smile.

"Jealous!" She threw up her hands, and the draperies of her robe fell away from her beautifully rounded arms. "He treats me like a nun. Whenever I appear in Opera I am escorted to the theatre and back by a posse of his servants who spy upon my every movement. At my con­versazioni no man under fifty dare talk with me for more than two minutes together without incurring the royal displeasure. And even when in the company of ladies, as you found me tonight, I am allowed to receive only elderly pussy-cats like Babaroni. Had they not been here, and your excuse for asking an interview been both so good and so pressing, I would never have risked permitting you to enter."

"Then, will not His Highness be much annoyed at finding me here?"

"This secret letter that you carry should prove your passport to immunity from that. Moreover, as you have never before seen me and are leaving Florence at once he will have no grounds for suspecting that our being together is the result of an assignation. But at times he is unpredictable; so I guarantee nothing. The choice is yours, and you are free to go if you prefer not to risk it."

It was the sort of dare that Roger had never been able to resist, and he replied without hesitation: "Provided my remaining brings no trouble to yourself the prospect of angering all the crowned heads in Europe would not drive me from you."

The corners of her mouth twitched. "For that I like you better than ever, Miester Brook. And now I will set your mind at rest. Some little time before His Highness is due to arrive here I shall put you to wait in a room apart. So you need be in no apprehension that he will think naughty thoughts about us."

"He is said to be an intelligent man," Roger remarked. "If so, no doubt you find his company a compensation for his monopoly of you."

She pouted. "He is well enough, and would be a pleasant com­panion were he not so atrociously suspicious that everyone is for ever hiding something from him. Even his own brother, the Emperor Joseph, once wrote to him: 'Let people deceive you sometimes rather than torment yourself constantly and vainly.' Yet he will not take such advice, and undoes the effects of his natural kindness by his unremitting itch to pry into everything."

"Far from putting a check upon deception, contact with such a nature usually irritates others into practising it."

No sooner had Roger uttered the truism than he regretted having done so; as Donna Livia gave him a swift glance, and replied: "I can imagine circumstances in which I might well be tempted to amuse myself at his expense."

Roger found her glance perturbing, but before he could turn the conversation she went on smoothly: "At one time or another he has suspected me of wanting to have an affaire with practically every presentable man in Florence; but there is not one of them who could keep a still tongue in his head afterwards, and I am not quite such a fool as to wish to be deprived of my jewels, and a secure old age on a handsome pension, for the sake of a few hours' pleasure. Yet were there a man I liked enough—and one whom I might regard as gone out of my life for good, tomorrow—then, the very fact of deceiving my royal lover under his nose would lend zest to such an adventure."

"I can well understand your feeling," Roger nodded; but he hastily continued: "I wonder if he ever suspects his Grand Duchess; though from what I hear the poor creature is so plain that he can have little cause to do so."

"You are right in that," Donna Livia smiled. "And she is a model wife. She has had sixteen children by him—the same number as the brood of which he was one himself—and despite his infidelities she still dotes upon him. But even she and I in combination are not sufficient to hold his entire interest. He often lies to me about it, but I know quite well that whenever he fails to come here, apart from Fridays and Sundays, it is because he is supping with some young thing who has caught his eye."

For the best part of an hour they talked on in the same intimate vein. Donna Livia was making the most of this unforeseen opportunity to unburden herself to a sympathetic and attractive stranger; and Roger, both intrigued by the extraordinary situation in which he found himself and fascinated by her beauty, had not given a single thought to Isabella. Neither of them sought to disguise from themselves that they were physically attracted to the other.

Several times they got on to dangerous ground when one word too much would have proved the spark to ignite them; but somehow, one or the other always turned the conversation just in time, and the electric current that threatened to flash between them was checked by a transfer of the subject from the personal to the general.

At length she asked him if he would like a glass of wine. On his accepting she stood up, and he followed her to a low, curtained doorway at one side of the room. The old woman who had been there when he arrived was still dozing in her corner. With a casual glance in her direction Donna Livia said:

"Do not concern yourself about old Pippa. She was His Highness's nurse, and is the one person he trusts; but I have long since bought her. Besides, she was once young herself, and knows that occasionally I must have a little recreation."

As Roger passed through the curtains, he swallowed hard, for he saw that she had brought him into a small room that he presumed few people except the Grand Duke were permitted to enter. It was obviously a chambre d’amour. The whole of its ceiling was made of mirrors; the walls were decorated with frescoes depicting the metamorphosis of Jupiter into a Bull, a Swan, and a Shower of Gold, while in the act of seducing various ladies in these disguises. The only furniture in the room consisted of a huge divan with a small table to either side of it, and one cabinet having a bookcase for its upper part and a cupboard below.

From the cupboard Donna Livia produced a bottle of champagne and glasses. While Roger opened the bottle and poured the wine, she took a thin folio volume from one of the shelves and began idly to turn its pages.

"What have you. there?" he asked, his voice coming a little un­steadily.

" 'Tis one of His Highness's favourites," she replied quietly. "This folio contains a set of beautifully executed paintings to illustrate the works of Pietro Aretino the Divine. Since this is His Highness's room and you are in it, perhaps it would amuse you to look through them with me."

Roger was already conversant with the writings of that extraordinary man who had been the boon companion of Titian and Sansovino three centuries earlier in Venice. With his heart pounding in his chest he took a pace forward and looked over her shoulder. The book was at that date the greatest treatise on the art of love that had ever been written, and the illustrations of the height of human rapture were the work of a great artist. Yet none of the women portrayed in them were more beautiful than Donna Livia.

Roger's arm slid round her waist. Beneath her flowing robe she wore no corsets. She turned and her big green eyes, now languorous with desire, met his. Suddenly she dropped the book, pressed her warm body against him and whispered:

"I would that I could prolong this moment. But we have little enough time. Let us make the most of it."

CHAPTER TWELVE

HOSTAGES TO FORTUNE

IT was ten o'clock. Roger sat alone in a small library on the far side of the marble hall from Donna Livia's salon. It was very quiet. No one seemed to be moving in the big house and he could have heard a hairpin drop.

Instead of amusing himself by looking at some of the thousand or so calf-bound, gilt-backed volumes the little room contained he was sitting uncomfortably on the edge of an elbowless chair, staring at the mosaic of the floor. It was well worthy of inspection, as it had once known the tread of patrician Roman feet in a villa at Baie; and, only after having lain buried there for many centuries, been removed and relaid, piece by piece, in its present position at the order of a Medici.

But Roger was not even conscious of it. With a mental pain, that almost seemed a physical hurt, he was thinking of Isabella, and wonder­ing miserably what could have possessed him to spend the past two hours in the way he had.

He knew perfectly well that it was no question of his having fallen in love with Donna Livia at first sight. But for the subtly intoxicating urge to passion that had radiated from her, he would have continued to regard her with much the same detached pleasure that other supremely beautiful, but inanimate, objects had afforded him during his stay in Florence. And he felt no love for her now. One does not have to love the ripe peach taken from a sunny garden wall because one enjoys its luscious flavour. On the contrary he felt that he loved Isabella more than he had ever done before.

The thought that he had been unfaithful to her troubled him greatly. It was one thing to recognize that time might cause passion to fade and lead to other loves; but quite another to betray love when it was still in its first blooming. He found it difficult to analyse his troubled mind, but the nearest he could get to doing so was the feeling that he had committed a kind of sacrilege.

His sense of guilt made him nervy and apprehensive. He now dreaded seeing Isabella again, yet at the same time was more anxious than ever to get back to her, so that they could get away together as swiftly as possible. His uneasiness was further added to by the horrid, lurking suspicion that in some way or other the gods would make him pay for his betrayal of love. He felt that he had given hostages to Fortune and would not feel secure again until he and Isabella were safely out of Italy.

The sound of movement in the hall aroused him from his unhappy brooding. He hoped that it was caused by the Grand Duke's arrival, and that proved to be the case. A few minutes later a servant came to fetch him, and he was conducted back to the salon.

Donna Livia was again reclining on her day-bed. Not a hair of her head was out of place and the expression on her beautiful face was now so demure that she might have been a picture of "Innocence" painted by Titian himself. The Grand Duke was standing beside her.

After three formal bows Roger permitted himself a good look at the ruler of Tuscany, while waiting to be addressed. Peter Leopold was then forty-two years of age. He was a tallish man with a slim figure. He had the same high forehead and blue eyes as his sister, but unlike her his nose was inclined to turn up at the tip. With a friendly smile at Roger, he said in German:

"Herr Brook, I understand that you are the bearer of a despatch to me from Her Majesty, my sister."

"Altess!’ Roger bowed again, and produced the sheets of tracing paper from his pocket. "I have that honour. Here it is; though you will observe that it is not the original. I considered that too bulky to carry with safety, so I made this transcript which was more easily concealable."

The Grand Duke took and glanced at the letter. "This is in our family's private cypher, but so altered as to be unreadable."

"May it please Your Highness, that was a further measure of my own for its greater security in transit. But the rules I devised for altering the original makes its retransposition simple to anyone who knows the secret. With your permission I will write them out for you."

"Be pleased to do so." The Grand Duke motioned Roger towards Donna Livia's secretaire, on which pens and paper were laid out. Sitting down there Roger quickly wrote out the key, and with a bow handed it to the sovereign, who said:

"I see the despatch is of considerable length, so I will not read it now, but at my leisure. It is possible that I may wish to send a reply. If so I assume you would be willing to take it for me ?"

At this bolt from the blue Roger felt that Nemesis had caught up with him already. But he was determined not to allow his own plans to be upset if he could possibly avoid it. So after only a second's hesitation, he replied:

"Any command Your Highness may give me, I should naturally feel it my duty to execute. But I am not in the service of Her Majesty of France. I acted as Her Majesty's messenger only because any gentleman of her own nation would have been suspect by her enemies; and urgent family matters now call for my return as soon as possible to England."

To his immense relief the Grand Duke did not press the matter, but said amiably: "In that case I would not dream of detaining you. I trust that you have been well looked after during your short visit to my city. Meggot's hotel has a good reputation for making those who stay there comfortable."

Roger was a little taken aback at this evidence that the secret police of Florence had thought it worth while to report his arrival, and done so with such swiftness; but he at once gave an assurance that he had lacked for nothing.

"How long is it since you left Versailles ?" the Grand Duke enquired.

"It is, alas, five weeks, Your Highness," Roger confessed. "And I humbly crave your pardon for not having delivered Her Majesty's letter to you sooner. But I was attacked by her enemies on the road and sustained wounds which, though not of a serious nature, compelled me to do the greater part of my journey in a coach."

"I am sorry to hear of it, and glad to see now that you appear fully recovered. It seems, though, that you can tell me nothing new of the state of affairs in France, as I have received much later intelligence from agents of my own who left long after you. But tell me, Herr Brook, why, on arriving in Florence, did you seek an audience of me through the Donna Livia, instead of waiting upon me at my palace ?"

"I first attempted to do so, Altess, but Her Majesty's enemies had reached Florence ahead of me, and frustrated my attempt by a further attack upon me here last night."

The Grand Duke frowned. "I was informed that you arrived at Meggot's only this afternoon."

"That is correct. But I reached Florence on Monday last, the first of June; and although the precaution against attack proved futile in the outcome, I sought to avoid it by taking lodgings under an assumed identity."

"Tell me of this attack. I have succeeded in making Florence a law-abiding city compared with many others; and the Watch shall be punished for their laxity in not having frustrated it. Give me, please, full particulars."

Roger then described how he had been kidnapped and taken before the hooded men. As he spoke of the tribunal the Grand Duke began to walk uneasily up and down, and muttered angrily to himself:

"These accursed Freemasons! They will be the undoing of us all. The stupidity of the nobility is past all understanding. How can they be so blind as to allow their liberal leanings to make them the allies of anarchists ? They flatter themselves that they can control the movement, but in that they make a hideous error. By using their wealth and influence to foster and conceal its activities the fools are weaving a halter that will one day be put round their own necks."

In deference to this royal monologue, Roger had paused; but the Sovereign added impatiently in a louder tone: "Go on! Go on. I am listening to you."

Roger had as yet made no mention of Isabella and, as briefly as he could, he now concluded his account without any reference to her.

When he had done the Grand Duke stood silent for a moment, then he continued his unhappy musing aloud. "I wonder if Scipione Ricci is concerned in this? He may be. Or it may be only his major-domo who is a traitor. Oh, I wish I knew! How can I find out ? I must find out somehow! And you! What guarantee have I that you are not lying to me about these people for some purpose of your own? Is there no one that I can trust ? No one ?"

For the first time Donna Livia spoke; addressing the Grand Duke in German, that being the language habitually used between them. With a wicked little smile at Roger from behind her royal lover's back, she said:

"At least, dear Prince, you know that I would never deceive you; and Herr Brook's account of this matter seems so circumstantial that it would be hard to doubt his veracity."

The Grand Duke swung round upon her. "I pray that you may be right in the first, gnadige frau for you are certainly wrong in the second."

Again Roger felt Nemesis rushing upon him as the suspicious ruler turned about, his slightly protuberant blue eyes now filled with a baleful light, and exclaimed:

"You have told but half the truth! If that! For now that I know you to be the man called de Breuc, who lodged at del Sarte Inglesi, I can add much to your story. You concealed yourself there instead of going to a larger place not from any fear of attack, but on account of a young woman who wished to hide the fact that she had come with you to Florence. Can you deny it?"

Since it was obvious that the Grand Duke knew about Isabella it would have been senseless to enrage him further by a downright lie. But, drawing a deep breath, Roger joined issue with him as best he could:

"Your Highness. The truth of all that I have had the honour to tell you is in no way invalidated by my omission to mention that I arrived in Florence with a lady. I owe to her my recovery from the wounds I received in the service of Her Majesty, your sister; and sought to repay something of my debt by giving her my escort on a part of her journey through Italy."

"And made her your mistress into the bargain, eh?"

"Nay, Altess." Roger could reply with perfect honesty. "She is unmarried, and I have treated her with every respect."

The Grand Duke evidently did not believe him, as he retorted with a sneer: "I will ask you a riddle. 'When is a Senorita not a Senorita?' And lest you lack the wit to find the answer I will give it. 'Tis: 'When she is lying at a lodging with a young man of your name and calls herself Madame de Breuc.'"

It being unthinkable to give a royal personage the lie, Roger was momentarily at a loss what to reply; but Donna Livia intervened on his behalf. Pretending to smother a yawn, she said:

"Forgive me, dear Prince, but I am hungry, and our supper waits. You must surely appreciate that if some young lady has granted her favours to Miester Brook, the elementary dictates of chivalry would restrain him from admitting it to you. In any case, his private affairs can be of no interest to a person of such exalted station as yourself."

He shot her a swift glance. "The trouble is that his private affairs are also those of others; and I have myself been dragged into them this very afternoon. 'Tis a niece of the Frescobaldi that he has seduced, and they are clamouring for his blood."

Roger endeavoured to conceal his perturbation at this alarming intelligence; and, feeling it more essential than ever to attempt to establish Isabella's innocence, he cried: "Your Highness, I do beg leave to protest. The lady adopted the married style only because her duenna died on the journey; and afterwards it provided a more circum­spect appearance for our lodging at the same inns that she should pass as my sister-in-law."

"Where is she now?" demanded the Grand Duke.

"On her way to Naples, Altess."

" 'Tis well for you that she left when she did. Had the Frescobaldi caught you with her they would have killed you out of hand. And they may catch you yet. This afternoon they asked the assistance of my police to trace you, and if you are apprehended you will be brought before me."

"Then, vowing my innocence, I take this opportunity of throwing myself on Your Highness's mercy, and craving your protection."

The Grand Duke gave Roger an unsmiling stare. "As to your innocence, I cannot bring myself to believe it. The circumstances against you are too strong. And if my judgment is at fault in that, you have still placed yourself in a position where you must pay the penalty for what you might have done, had you had a mind to it. You do not seem to appreciate the iniquity of your offence, and must, I think, have been crazy to compromise so great a lady."

"Altess, I am now deeply conscious of my folly," Roger admitted, in consternation at the way in which matters were going. "But I beg to remind Your Highness that the lady is not yet compromised; nor will she be if her relatives have the sense to refrain from making the matter public."

"In that your hopes are vain, for 'tis already the talk of Florence. And should you be brought before me, I shall have no alternative but to deal severely with you. Were not proper safeguards maintained against young men ruining the reputations of unmarried girls of high station there would be an end to all society. The Frescobaldi have incontestable grounds for demanding that I send you to cool your ardour in prison for a term of years; and they are too powerful a clan for me to go contrary to their wishes in any matter where a major policy of the State is not concerned. Besides, did I quash the case, on learning of the insult to his daughter. General Count d'Aranda would ask His Most Catholic Majesty to make representations on the matter to me. And I have no intention of allowing so trivial an affair to be magnified to the extent of creating bad feeling between Spain and Tuscany."

At the threat of a term of imprisonment Roger felt again all the dismay he had experienced while in de Vaudreuil's custody at Fontainebleau; and more, for now it would mean his losing his beloved Isabella. Hastily he pleaded:

"Altess, since I sloughed off the identity of a Frenchman at midday, 'tis possible that I may escape the attentions of your police while lying at Meggot's tonight. As I have already informed Your Highness, now that I have fulfilled my mission, I am most anxious to return to England. If I remain uncaptured I shall leave Florence first thing tomorrow morning. But it may be that by this time your police have already concluded that de Breuc and myself are one. If so, on my return to Meggot's, or in a few hours' time, I shall be arrested. May I not beg your clemency at least to the extent of affording me your protection for tonight?"

The Grand Duke shook his head. "Nay. That would entail my withdrawing the order for your arrest, and I am not prepared to compromise myself that far. I have no personal animus against you, so I will take no steps to prevent your leaving Florence if you can. But by your folly you have made a bed of nettles for yourself, and if you are caught must lie upon it."

Roger's mind began to revolve in swift, desperate plans for evading capture. He dared not now return to Meggot's. Would it be possible to get out of the city by dropping from one of its walls during the night? If not, he must hide himself somewhere till morning. But in either case he would now have no horse, and it would take him several hours to walk to Pontassieve. He was about to beg permission to take his leave when, suddenly, Donna Livia came to his rescue.

"Dear Prince," she said quietly. "I trust you will not take it amiss if I recall to you that you owe a debt to this gentleman. He has travelled far upon your business, and shown both wit and courage in executing his mission. Indeed, he has actually sustained wounds while bringing Her Majesty, your sister's, letter to you. However incensed you may justly feel at his personal conduct, surely his request for a night of grace is but a small reward for the service he has rendered?"

"True, true!" muttered the Grand Duke. "With the complaints of the Frescobaldi still fresh in my ears I had forgotten about the letter." Then, his expression changing to one of suspicion, he gave her a dark look, and added: "But what is he to you? Why should you take up the cudgels on his behalf? Tell me. What is he to you?"

Roger's heart missed a beat. For a moment it had seemed that Donna Livia's good nature had saved him. But now his hopes were in jeopardy once more. Would she dare to continue in the role of his champion? And if she did might she not further inflame to his disadvantage her royal lover's jealous mania ?

She shrugged her shoulders. "He is to me no more than a foreigner whose opinion may redound to my dear Prince's credit or otherwise. Should he succeed in escaping unaided he will carry but a poor opinion of Your Highness to England and elsewhere. Therefore, for the honour of Tuscany, I pray you give him a pass so that he may leave the city tonight, and thus at least have a fair chance of eluding his enemies."

In horrible suspense Roger waited for the Grand Duke's reply. At length Leopold nodded. "You are right. To let him be caught through having remained here on my business would ill become me. And if I do as you suggest it cannot afterwards be proved that I did so knowing that he was Sis Monsieur de Breuc that the Frescobaldi are seeking."

Fishing in his waistcoat pocket, he produced a small gold medallion, that had his head on one side of it and a figure of Mercury upon the other. Holding it out to Roger, he said:

"This is a talisman carried only by couriers bearing my most urgent despatches. Even should the police already be at Meggot's, on your producing it they will not dare to detain you; and on your showing it at the guard-house of the Pisa gate the gate will be opened for you."

As he took the medallion Roger went down on one knee and mur­mured his gratitude; then, his boldness returning, he begged permission to kiss Donna Livia's hand, as that of his protectress.

Permission being granted she extended her hand to him and said severely: "I trust your narrow escape will be a lesson to you, Miester Brook. And that should you return to Tuscany you will bear it well in mind that His Highness's high moral rectitude is unlikely to permit him again to show leniency, should you indulge in acts of seduction."

Roger felt the laughter bubbling inside him, but he dared show his appreciation of her witty sally only by the twinkling of his eyes. With renewed thanks to the Grand Duke he bowed his way from the room, and two minutes later was out of the house.

At Meggot's he learned to his relief that no one had enquired for him; so he had his things packed, paid his bill, mounted his grey and rode off through the almost deserted streets to the Pisa gate. There, after a short wait, an officer was fetched who, at the sight of the medallion, at once had the gate opened. The clocks of Florence were chiming eleven as he left the city.

He thought it almost certain that the courier's talisman would have secured his exit at any other gate, and that the Grand Duke had specified the one opening on to the Pisa road only because he had been led to suppose that his visitor meant to head for Leghorn and England. But now, being aware of his suspicious nature, Roger feared that he might check up the following morning, so had followed his instructions to the letter. Doing so necessitated riding in a great semi-circle round the outside of the city wall, but another twenty minutes brought him on to the Pontassieve road. As he turned eastward along it he felt that at last he had put Florence and its dangers behind him.

Yet, again he became oppressed by his sense of guilt as the thought of the way in which he had spent the earlier part of the evening kept on recurring to him. For a little he took refuge in the argument that if he had not pleasured Donna Livia she might not later have come to his rescue, and that by this time, instead of still being a free man, he might be on his way to one of the Grand Duke's prisons. But he knew that the argument did not hold water, because he had given way in the first situation before he had the least idea that the second might occur.

He then began to wonder if the episode had been a great exception in Donna Livia's life, and, flattering as it would have been to assume so, he decided that it probably had not. Her remark that he need not concern himself about the old nurse certainly suggested that it was not the first time she had deceived her royal lover. No doubt she had to be extremely careful to whom she offered such opportunities, and confined her gallantries to men like himself, who came to her house by chance and it was unlikely that she would see again. He wondered if any such had ever refused her, and in view of her beauty decided that was most improbable. If so, the odds were that some of those others had also betrayed young wives or sweethearts at the temptation of her passionate embrace. That thought was a comfort in a way, but somehow it did not make him much less ashamed of himself.

Once more the idea came to him that a mocking Fate might yet make him pay for those two hours of blissful abandon that he had spent in Donna Livia's arms. But he had suffered such acute apprehension during the hour that followed that he hoped the god of: Fidelity—if there was one—might consider he had been punished enough already.

As he rode through Pontassieve every house was dark arid shuttered. On passing the inn he looked up at Isabella's window, and he wished desperately that he had never been compelled to leave her that afternoon. But it was no good crying over spilt milk. The great thing was that he would be with her again the following morning, and the sooner he forgot the existence of the lovely, wanton Donna Livia the better.

Ten minutes later he was knocking up the people at the farm. The man had been sleeping in his day clothes and, shuffling out, led the grey round to the stable. Roger took off his outer things, pulled the blankets of his bed-roll round him, and in a few minutes was sleeping the sleep of the unrighteous—which .at times a merciful Providence permits to be as sound as that of the just.

When he woke in the morning he felt splendidly well. All the heavi­ness that he had been feeling for the past few weeks was gone. He decided that the night before he had been making mountains out of molehills, and could now view his brief affaire with Donna Livia in proper perspective. It had been a marvellous experience and one that he would not have missed for worlds. To take a Grand Duke's favourite mistress practically under his nose was no small triumph. No young man of courage and sense could possibly have resisted such an opportunity; and had he been fool enough to do so he would have regretted it ever afterwards. Just to think of lying on one's deathbed and remembering that one had had such a chance, yet acted the prude and not taken it! How his dear Georgina would have mocked him, had he confessed to her such a failure to play the man through silly scruples. Far from forgetting the passionate Tuscan, she would become one of his treasured memories, and that would not interfere in the very least with his genuine devotion to Isabella.

Having washed himself and dressed he ate a simple but hearty breakfast, of four fresh eggs and a huge chunk of home-cured ham, with voracious appetite. Then, humming gaily to himself, he sought to kill time* by wandering round the farm slashing the heads off weeds with the point of his sword. He felt that he could have jumped a five-barred gate or taken on half a dozen of the Grand Duke's police single-handed.

At ten past eight he loaded his things into the panniers of one of the mules, and the farmer helped him to saddle up the other animals; then, at a few minutes before the half-hour, now filled with happy anticipa­tion at the thought of getting off, he strode with a buoyant step as far as the road to welcome Isabella on her arrival.

Half past eight came but no Isabella. For ten minutes he sauntered up and down quite unperturbed, but by a quarter to nine he began to grow a little impatient. At ten minutes to the hour his exaltation had collapsed like a pricked balloon; five minutes later he had become the prey of desperate anxiety.

Suddenly it occurred to him that she might have thought that he had timed the rendezvous for nine o'clock. For a few minutes the idea brought him intense relief. But the hour still brought no sign of her. With an effort he compelled himself to give her a further five minutes' grace. Then he could bear it no longer. Running to his grey, he swung himself into the saddle and galloped off up the road to the inn.

Outside it there was no coach; none of her servants was visible. The place lay quiet in the morning sunshine; it showed no activity of any kind. White with dismay, and feeling as though the heavens were about to fall upon him, he flung himself from his horse and dashed inside.

In the kitchen he found the innkeeper, preparing a piece of raw meat. The man gave him a curious look, then with a greasy thumb and forefinger drew a letter from his apron pocket.

"I was expecting you, Signor," he said in Italian. "The Signorina left here late in the afternoon of yesterday, and her maid asked me to give you this."

Snatching the letter Roger tore it open with trembling fingers. The writing was barely legible, having run in places where it had been copiously watered with Isabella's tears. Half blinded with his own, and, in an agony to know what had occurred, skipping from line to line, he gradually made it out. It ran:

O love of my life.

All our stratagems have proved in vain. My aunt and cousin arrived here this afternoon. They were half-mad with rage and mortifica­tion at the dishonour they say I have done our house. They treated both myself and my servants like criminals. Under their threats Pedro broke down and confessed that he believed you to be my lover. It is due to your chivalry alone that I was able to prove to my aunt that I am still a virgin.

That mollified her somewhat. She considers that it will save me from repudiation by my fiancé. But she insisted that I should proceed at once to Naples under the escort of my horrid cousin and his men-at-arms. For two hours I withstood her while she prated of my duty. At length she confronted me with the terrible alternative. If I persisted in my refusal she would have you slain as the cause of it.

Something, I know not what, has made them suspect that you mean to rejoin me here. She threatened to carry me to Florence as a prisoner and leave men in ambush at the inn to kill you on your return.

I love you more than my life. To save yours I will face any future, however repugnant to me. I have now consented to do as she wishes. In a few minutes I set out again for Naples under my cousin1 s escort.

I begged my aunt for a brief respite before setting out to compose myself by prayer. I am using it to write this. Maria will see that the innkeeper has it to give to you.

I pray you by our love not to follow me. Gusippi Frescobaldi has with him a dozen men. Any attempt to snatch me from them could result only in your death. That would render my sacrifice in vain. The thought that I had brought about your death would drive me insane. I would go mad and dash out my brains against a wall.

I am resigned. I assure you I am resigned. For a month I have lived in a sweet dream. To think of it will be my consolation all my life long. But I am awake again. I must be brave and undertake the duties to which my birth has called me. But without the knowledge that you still live and sometimes still think of me I should lack the courage.

I shall never love anyone else. Never! Never!

Good-bye, dear chivalrous English Knight. Good-bye, sweet companion of my soul.

While life doth last,

Your Isabella.

His eyes blurred with tears, Roger thrust the letter into his pocket. His throat was tight with the agony of his loss and, as he stumbled from the kitchen, he shook with rage at this annihilation of all his plans. In spite of Isabella's pleas he had already determined to follow her. Twelve men or a hundred might guard her, but somehow by wit and courage he would get her back.

He had hardly covered half the distance to the street when a side door in the passage opened. An officer came out and behind him Roger vaguely glimpsed a squad of soldiers. He made to push his way past, but the officer barred his passage and, thrusting another letter at him, said curtly in bad French:

"For you, Monsieur. By His Highness the Grand Duke's orders."

In a daze Roger tore the missive open, and read:

As we supposed would be the case, instead of proceeding to Leghorn you have attempted to rejoin the Senorita d'Aranda. Consider yourself fortunate that we have not ordered that you be brought back to Florence to face the accusations of the Frescobaldi. It is our pleasure that within three days you should have left Tuscany. You may proceed at your choice either towards Leghorn or Milan. The officer who delivers this letter will escort you to our frontier.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE FIRST REVOLUTION

DURING the month of June 1789 an event took place some 10,000 miles from Florence that was to have serious repercussions in Europe and, eventually, decide the fate of Isabella and Roger.

On the other side of the world, in the distant Pacific, Spanish and English seamen became involved in a local dispute that later threat­ened to develop into a world war. Many years earlier the Spaniards had sent expeditions from their South American ports northward along the Pacific coast on voyages of exploration. Mexico was already one of their oldest colonies, and they further claimed sovereign rights over the western seaboard all the way up to Alaska. More recently, one of their captains, named Perez, had, in 1774, discovered the harbour of Nootka Sound on the island of Vancouver. But Britain's great explorer, Captain Cook, paid a lengthy visit to the place four years later; and, as the Spaniards—apparently content with their rich possessions in Chile,

Mexico and Peru—showed no signs of developing this outpost in the far, cold north, it was assumed in Whitehall that it could now be regarded as British.

Owing to the wars that ensued during the next seven years the shipping of both nations was so fully occupied that the North American Pacific coast remained deserted. But from '85 numerous British vessels visited Nootka Sound to buy furs from the Indians. Then, in '88, Catherine II's greed for territory led to the Russians pushing eastwards across the Behinng Strait into Alaska. The Spaniards, alarmed for their theoretical sovereignty over lands first discovered by them, decided to bestir themselves. In the following summer, Flores, Viceroy of Mexico, sent the Captains Martinez and Haro north in the warships Princesa and San Carlos to occupy Nootka before a base could be established there by any other Power. On their arrival they found two English traders, the Iphigenia and Argonaut, in the Sound; upon which they seized the ships, imprisoned their British crews and sent them as captives to Mexico.

Nothing of this was known in Europe until many months later; but owing to it, had things taken only a slightly different turn, all history from that year might have entirely altered its course. The King and Queen of France might have escaped execution, the Revolution never culminated in a monstrous Terror, Napoleon Bonaparte never emerged to disrupt the lives of millions; and those two tiny pawns in the game, Roger and Isabella, might have met with a fate far removed from that which actually fell to them.

But in those middle days of June neither believed that they would ever meet again. Miserable but resigned, she was travelling south in her coach to Naples; while, filled with bitter rage and frustration, he was riding as though possessed by devils north-westward back across the Alps into France.

On learning of her departure there had been nothing that he could do. Nothing. In his saner moments he realized that he was extremely lucky to have escaped being hauled back to Florence and thrown into prison. So, electing to return to France by the shortest route, he had allowed himself to be escorted to the Tuscan frontier; and from there on endeavoured to allay his grief through the physical exertion of hard riding.

In any other circumstances he would have lingered among the treasures that Bologna, Modena, Parma, Piacenza and Turin had to show, and delighted in the landscapes of snow-capped mountains against blue skies as he wound his way through the Mont Cenis pass; but he dismounted only to eat and sleep; his eyes were blind and his heart numb from the belief that he had lost for good the love of a lifetime. On June 16th he arrived in Paris, half dead with fatigue, yet still consumed with unappeasable longings and such poignant grief that he felt he would never again be capable of taking a real interest in anything.

Next morning, although he woke early, he lay long abed; but eventually he felt that he could not stay there indefinitely and must sooner or later make an effort to pull himself together. It was a sub­conscious impulse to deaden the pain in his mind by employing himself with his original mission that had dictated his return to France; and he realized now that he must either go on to England with the object of resigning his task, or take it up again with such initiative as he could muster. If he adopted the first course he knew that it would lead to a brief interval of wild dissipation in London, followed by a long period of penniless brooding at his home in Lymington; moreover, it would probably mean the untimely end of a career which, despite its occasional dangers, provided him with everything that he normally prized most highly. On the other hand, the second course, while seeming at the moment dreary, fatiguing and lacking in all interest, would at least prevent him making a fool of himself. So, being at rock bottom a sensible young man, he decided on the latter.

When he had lived in Paris as secretary to Monsieur de Rochambeau he had often dined at La Belle Etoile in the Rue de l’Arbe Sec, and had come to know well the patron and his wife, a couple from Cabourg in Normandy, named Blanchard. In consequence, on his return in the previous April he had taken a room there; and, once more, the preceding evening, they had welcomed his reappearance. So, when he was dressed, he went downstairs and invited his old friend, the landlord, to join him in a midday draught.

Monsieur Blanchard was a fair-haired, blue-eyed man; honest according to his lights, intelligent and hardworking. He was also shrewd enough to realize that in these times of violent and diverse opinions it paid an innkeeper better to let his customers talk, and agree with them, than to air his own views. As mine host of a well-patronized hostelry in central Paris he missed very little of what was going on in the capital; and, knowing his deliberately cultivated impartiality, Roger felt that a talk with the cautious Norman would be the quickest way to bring himself up to date with the news.

The good Mere Blanchard, an apple-cheeked, motherly soul, had already solicitously remarked on Roger's haggard looks, and he had put them down to a slow summer fever contracted in the south of France; so he was not called on now to give further explanations to account for his sadly altered appearance. Without preamble he announced that, having been absent from Paris for seven weeks, he had heard little of what had been going on, except that the States General had met early in May, and was anxious to be acquainted with more recent events.

The landlord shrugged. "Really, Monsieur le Chevalier, there is little to tell. So far the States have disappointed us sadly. Their proceed­ings go on with zealous regularity but they have not yet got to the point of discussing the ills of the nation, let alone proposing remedies for them. The whole time of the Third Estate has been taken up with urging the other two to join it, but the nobles continue adamant in their refusal and meanwhile the clergy sit upon the fence."

"Has nothing whatever been accomplished, then?" asked Roger in some surprise.

"Nothing, Monsieur; although the events of the past week give slightly better promise. On the ioth the Abbé Sieyes moved that a last invitation be issued to the first Two Orders to join the Third, and that if it was refused the Third should proceed on its own with the verification of credentials. No reply being forthcoming verification was started on the 12th. Since then nine of the clergy have come over, and verification has been completed. What will be the next move remains to be seen."

"And how have the people of Paris taken this inactivity?"

"With patience, Monsieur. There have been no major disturbances. But a new element seems to be percolating into the city which fills many of us with uneasiness. As you walk abroad you will now notice here and there little groups of foreigners idling on the street corners— rough, brutal-looking men who speak only a patois of the South. How or why they should have come here, and who supports them, nobody knows; but wherever there is an outcry they are to be seen participating in it, although it is no concern of theirs."

"Is there no other news?"

"None of moment; other than the death of the Dauphin on the fourth of this month; but naturally, you will have heard of that."

Roger shook his head. "I had not. As I told your wife and yourself last night, I have been ill for some weeks; and on my journey north I still felt too poorly to enter into conversation with strangers. Of what did the young prince die ?"

"None of the doctors could put a name to his ailment, Monsieur; although it lasted for fifteen months. 'Tis said that all the poor little fellow's hair fell out and that his body was covered with pustules. And further, that since his corpse was embalmed it has shrunk to the size of a new-born infant's. His sufferings were great but I understand that he showed extraordinary fortitude for a child, and spent his last moments comforting his distraught parents."

"His loss must have proved a tragic sorrow to the Queen."

"Aye," nodded the stolid Norman dispassionately. "Perhaps it was a judgment on her; but wicked as she is one cannot help feeling sorry for the poor woman in the loss of her eldest son."

It was Roger's business to collect information; so he refrained from the impulse to prejudice his source by entering on a defence of

Madame Marie Antoinette. For a moment he remained silent, then, feeling that nothing more was to be gathered from his landlord, he ordered his horse with the intention of riding out to Versailles.

While it was being saddled he pondered the mystery of the Dauphin's death. To him, the symptoms—loss of hair, suppurating sores and decayed bones—sounded suspiciously like hereditary syphilis. Yet the Queen came from healthy stock, and the King was said to have refrained from sexual intercourse until eight years after his marriage, owing to a slight malformation which was later rectified by the nick of a surgeon's knife. Perhaps the boy had been the innocent victim of the immoralities of his great-grandfather, Louis XV. On the other hand it was just possible that one of the lecherous old King's cronies had, when Louis XVI was only a lad, amused himself by initiating the young prince into vice. If so, such a terrible disease contracted in his youth might easily account for his later horror of women and continued celibacy even after his marriage. It was an interesting speculation.

When Roger arrived at Versailles he found to his annoyance that the Court was not in residence. On the previous Sunday, following the obsequies of the Dauphin, the King and Queen had retired with the barest minimum of attendants to the privacy of their little chateau not far distant at Marly. Nevertheless, owing to the sittings of the States General the royal town was a seething mass of people; and the very first of his acquaintances that Roger ran into was the suave and subtle Monsieur de Perigord.

Limping up to him, the elegant but unworthy Bishop first con­gratulated him on his return, then expressed concern at his woebegone appearance.

Again Roger explained his hollow cheeks and sunken eyes as the result of a slow fever, and added that never again would he be tempted to expose himself to the treacherous climate of the Mediterranean. For a few moments they talked of Cannes, where he said he had spent the greater part of his period of exile, owing to its already having become a favourite resort of the English; then he remarked:

"From what I hear you do not seem to be making much progress with your Revolution."

"On the contrary," replied the Bishop blandly. "The Revolution became an accomplished fact three days ago."

Roger cocked an eyebrow. "Are the people then already become bored with politics, that they have accepted their triumph with so little excitement?"

"Nay, 'tis simply that few, even of the deputies themselves, realized the full implication of the momentous step taken by the Third Estate until this morning."

"I pray you read me this riddle."

"On Friday the 12th, all efforts of the Third Estate to induce the other two Orders to join them having failed, they decided to proceed with verification on their own. The verification was completed on the 14th. From that point they could not go backwards, or stand still, so willy-nilly they had to go forward and consider themselves as a duly elected parliament with powers to legislate on behalf of the nation. If the taking of such a step without the consent of the Kong, clergy or nobles does not constitute a Revolution, tell me what does."

"You are right. But what has occurred this morning to make people suddenly sensible of this epoch-making development?"

"For the past three days the deputies of the Third Estate have been debating their next move. They sat all through last night until near dawn. After a few hours' sleep they met again and formally announced their decisions. They have assumed the title of National Assembly, promised an immediate enquiry into the reasons for the scarcity of bread, pledged the credit of the nation to honour the public debt and, last but not least, deprived the King of all power to levy future taxes. They have decreed that all existing taxes, although unlawful, not having been sanctioned by the people, should continue to be paid until the day on which the National Assembly separates; after which no taxes not authorized by them should be paid by anybody."

"Strap me!" exclaimed Roger. "This is indeed a revolution. Should the King now force their dissolution he will be left high and dry without a penny. Who were the men that initiated such defiance?"

"Their new title was suggested by Legrand of Berry; Sieyes drafted many of the minutes; Target and La Chapelier proposed the measures, but the dynamic force of Mirabeau lies behind everything they do. I think him loyal to the Crown but he is determined to humble his own Order."

"I should much like to meet him."

"You shall. Come and sup with me one evening at Passy. I can linger no longer now, as I am on my way to a session of my own chamber. Three curés of Poitou went over to the Third Estate on the 12th, and six other clergy joined them the next day. More will follow, without a doubt, so I am watching developments with considerable interest."

Roger accepted the invitation with alacrity and, having said adieu to the cynical Churchman, spent an hour or two in casual gossip with various other people. He then returned to Paris, stabled his horse and walked round to the Palais Royal.

The palace had been built by the millionaire minister Cardinal Mazarin, during the minority of Louis XIV. It was a vast edifice enclos­ing a huge quadrangle in which flourished a number of chestnut trees. The Due d'Orleans' household occupied only the main block and the pper parts of its three other sides. An arcade ran round the latter, beneath which their ground floors had been converted into shops and cafes. The open space under the trees was now what the corner of Hyde Park inside Marble Arch was later to become—the stamping-ground of every crank and soap-box orator who thought he could impart a certain remedy for the public ills. In recent months, under the protection of M. d'Orleans it had become the central breeding-ground of all sedition, and from morning to night agitators were to be seen there openly inciting the mob to resist the edicts of the Government.

At the Cafi de Foix Roger had a drink, then strolled across to join the largest group of idlers, who were listening to an attractive-looking man of about thirty. He had wild, flowing hair and, despite an impedi­ment in his speech, drove his points home with the utmost violence. An enquiry of a bystander elicited the fact that he was a lawyer from Picardy, named Camille Desmoulins, who held extreme views and was one of the crowd's favourite orators.

Having listened to his diatribes for a while Roger picked ten chestnut leaves and a twig from a low branch of one of the trees, put them in an envelope he had brought for the purpose, and took it along to Monsieur Aubert's. He then returned to his inn and spent the evening writing a report for Mr. Pitt upon the political situation as he had found it in Tuscany, and the personality of its ruler.

Next morning at ten o'clock he met Mr. Daniel Hailes at a small cafe" just round the corner from the Palais Royal, in the Rue Richelieu. After handing over his despatch he gave a bare account of his journey to Italy, omitting all mention of his love affair with Isabella, then asked the diplomat what he thought of the present situation.

"This week," Mr. Hailes replied a trifle ponderously, "we shall witness the crisis in the affairs of France to which events have steadily been leading ever since Louis XVI dismissed Turgot, in '76. Had the King had the courage to maintain that wise Minister in office a steady series of Liberal reforms, each initiated before it was demanded, might by now have regenerated the nation and even further increased the stability of the monarchy. But thirteen years of vacillation and futile announcements that reforms were being considered have ended by bringing the monarchy to the brink. If the King accepts the declaration of the self-constituted National Assembly, he will be laying his crown at their feet. But he may not do so. At the moment troops from all parts of the country are being concentrated in the neighbourhood of Paris. Having ample forces at his disposal His Majesty may decide to face the people's wrath and send 'his loyal commons' packing."

"One thing is certain," remarked Roger. "He will do nothing into which he is not forced by some stronger personality."

Mr. Hailes nodded. "Yes, he is now doubtless tossing like a shuttle­cock between Messieurs Necker, Montmorin and St. Priest on the one hand and the Queen, the Comte d'Artois, Barentin and d'Espreménil on the other."

"I thought the latter was the member of the Parliament of Paris who led its violent opposition to the King two years ago."

"He is, but times have changed. The Parliament now realizes that in having weakened the King's authority it has also weakened its own. Since he was forced to call the States General, the Parliament has become practically an anachronism. All too late it is now trying to get back its prestige by clinging to the coat-tails of the Sovereign. D'Espreménil is one of the few Nobles of the Robe who have secured a seat in the Second Estate, and he has emerged as an ardent champion of the monarchy."

Leaning forward, Mr. Hailes went on in a lower tone: "I have much to do, so I must leave you now. But this is for your ear alone, as it is still a closely guarded secret. I have it on good authority that on Monday next, the 22nd, the King intends to hold a Royal Session. At it he will address the Three Estates in person. He is in a corner now and can vacillate no longer. When he has spoken the fate of France will be known."

The Royal Session did not take place on the 22nd; it was postponed till the 23rd; but the preparations for it brought about an event of the first importance. The Court not only kept the secret well but committed the stupid blunder of not even communicating the King's intention to Monsieur Bailly, the much-respected scientist whom the National Assembly had appointed as its President.

In consequence, on the morning of Saturday the 20th, the members , of the Third Estate arrived at their usual meeting-place to find its doors closed against them. Actually this was in order that workmen could once more erect the throne-dais and stands in the hall necessary for a royal appearance there; but the deputies, not unnaturally, jumped to the conclusion that an attempt was being made to prevent their holding further meetings.

Thereupon, they adjourned in an angry crowd to the palace tennis court and, in the presence of numerous members of the public, gave vent to their indignation. Mounier proposed that they should take an oath not to separate until Constitutional Government had been estab­lished, and the oath was taken amid scenes of wild enthusiasm,, only one solitary member dissenting.

On the Monday the situation was further aggravated by the Comte d'Artois taking possession of the tennis court to play a game there; but the Assembly resumed its sittings in the Church of St. Louis and the day proved one of triumph for it. Already, on the 19th, the clergy, their long indecision resolved by the momentous events of the proceeding days, had voted by 149 against 115 for joint verification; and now, headed by the Archbishops of Vienne and Bordeaux, and accompanied by two nobles, the bulk of the First Estate came to sit with the Third in its new temporary quarters.

Roger, meanwhile, had found his plans frustrated by the death of the Dauphin. Normally he would have sought access to the Queen as soon as possible, reported the delivery of her letter, and requested permission to remain at her disposal, as that would have placed him in a good position to find out the intentions of the Court. But he did not feel that he had sufficient excuse to disturb her at Marly, so he remainde gloomily in Paris, occupying his mind as well as he could by renewing his acquaintance with various people.

However, on Sunday evening he learned that the Court had returned to Versailles; so on the Monday morning he rode out there again, and, after some difficulty, ran de Vaudreuil to earth. His ex-jailor greeted him as an old friend but advised against any attempt to see the Queen for the moment. He said that far from the Sovereigns having been left to their grief while at Marly they had been disturbed almost hourly with fresh advice as to how to deal with the crisis, and were still fully occupied by it. The Royal Council had joined them there, with the addition of the King's two brothers, and the most frightful wrangles had ensued. Monsieur Necker had prepared a speech for the King which Barentin, the Keeper of the Seals, had violently .opposed as a complete surrender to the Third Estate. Necker had retired in a dudgeon and the others had altered his speech till it was unrecognizable; but no one yet knew for certain what the unstable Monarch really would say at the Royal Session.

Roger said that he would greatly like to be present at it, so de Vaudreuil obligingly secured him a card of admission to the stand reserved for distinguished foreigners.

In consequence, he was up before dawn the following day and early at Versailles to secure his place in the Salle des Menus Plaisirs. It was raining quite hard and when he arrived he found that although the great hall was already a quarter filled with clergy and nobles, stand­ing about talking in little groups, the Third Estate had been locked outside to wait in the wet until the Two senior Orders had taken their seats. Since the hall was so vast that it would hold 2,000 people there seemed no possible excuse for such invidious and flagrant discourtesy.

As an Englishman, he appreciated the great virtues of his own country's political system, by which King, Lords and Commons each enjoyed a degree of power that acted as a protection against a dictator­ship by either of the other two; so he sympathized with the Court and nobles of France in their endeavour to retain powers which would act as a brake upon any attempt by the representatives of the masses to overturn the whole established order. But the way they were going about it filled him with angry amazement, and the idea of keeping even a deputation of peasants out in the rain unnecessarily snowed both their stupidity and heartless lack of concern for anything other than their own interests.

Eventually the Third Estate was let in and in due course the royal party arrived, so Roger was able to let his eye rove over the sea of faces behind which lay the thoughts that would prove the making or marring of the France that was to be. Many of the senior prelates looked fat, self-satisfied and dull. The nobles held themselves arrogantly, but they were mainly narrow-headed and rather vacuous-looking. The faces of the Third Estate were, on average, much sharper-featured than those of the other two, their eyes were keener and many of them possessed fine broad foreheads. Roger decided that in them were concentrated four-fifths of the brains, ability and initiative of the whole assembly.

On the King's appearance many of the nobles and clergy had received him with shouts of "Vive le Roi!" but the whole of the Third Estate had maintained a hostile silence. A young Bavarian diplomat, who was next to Roger, remarked to him that the gathering had a sadly different atmosphere from that at the opening of the States on the 5th of May, as then everyone had been hopeful and enthusiastic, whereas now, not only good feeling, but the splendid pageantry of the first meeting, was lacking.

From the throne the King made his will known. As he proceeded to reprimand the Third Estate for its recent assumption of powers with­out his authority, he spoke awkwardly and without conviction. His uneasiness became even more apparent when two secretaries read on his behalf the decisions arrived at, as these were mainly contrary to his own sentiments and obviously those of the more reactionary members of his Council.

The statements decreed that the Three Orders should remain separate as an essential part of the Constitution, but could meet together when they thought it convenient. Revision of taxes was promised, but all feudal rights and privileges were to be maintained. Provincial Estates were to be established throughout the kingdom, but no promise was given that another States General would be summoned on the dissolution of the present one. The creation of the National Assembly and the measures passed by it the preceding week were declared illegal and thereby cancelled.

Finally the King spoke again, bidding the Three Orders to meet again in their respective chambers the next day, and in the meantime to separate.

When the Monarch had retired the majority of the clergy and nobles followed him, but the Third Estate remained where they were.

The Marquis de Brez6, who was Grand Master of the Ceremonies, then came forward and said in a loud voice:

"Gentlemen, you have heard His Majesty's commands."

All eyes turned to the Comte de Mirabeau. Springing to his feet, the great champion of liberty cried:

"If you have been ordered to make us quit this place, you must ask for orders to use force, for we will not stir from our places save at the point of the bayonet."

The declaration was a bold one, as the town was full of troops, and a company of guards had even been stationed in and about the chamber. But Mirabeau had voiced the feelings of his colleagues, and his words were greeted with a thunder of applause.

De Breze refused to take an answer from a private member, so Bailly, as President of his Order, announced firmly that he had no power to break up the assembly until it had deliberated upon His Majesty's speech.

On De Breze withdrawing an angry tumult ensued. The Abbé Sieves at length got a hearing and with his usual penetrating brevity reminded the deputies that they were today no less than what they were yesterday. Camus followed him with a resolution that the Assembly persisted in its former decrees, which was passed unanimously. Then Mirabeau mounted the tribune and proposed that "This Assembly immediately declare each of its members inviolable, and proclaim that anyone who offers them violence is a traitor, infamous and guilty of a capital crime."

There were excellent grounds for such a proposal at the moment, as many of the more outspoken deputies now feared that their defiance of the royal command might be used as an excuse for their arrest; so the motion was passed by an overwhelming majority. The Assembly, having assumed this new sovereign power of the sacredness of its persons, then adjourned.

After lingering for an hour or so at Versailles, talking to people whom he knew, Roger returned to Paris to find the city in a state of frantic excitement. The King had that day tacitly acknowledged a Constitution; but he had given too little and too late. Good solid citizens as well as the mobs were now alike determined that he should give much more.

It was rumoured that Necker had resigned and this caused a panic-stricken run on the banks. Next day it transpired that he had done so but the King, now scared by such widespread commotions, had humbled himself to the extent of begging the Swiss to continue in office, for a time at least.

On the 25th Roger went again to Versailles and found it as agitated as Paris. That morning, to the wild applause of the population, the

Due d'Orleans had led 47 nobles to join the National Assembly, and the clergy who had so far stood out were now coming over in little groups hour by hour. Their most obstinate opponent of union was the Arch­bishop of Paris. During the previous winter he had practically ruined himself in buying food for the starving; but, despite this, he was set upon by a band of ruffians and threatened with death unless he joined the Assembly. Alternately the streets of the royal town rang with cheers and echoed with shouts of hatred.

Late that afternoon Roger found de Vaudreuil, who agreed to mention his return to the Queen, and asked him to wait in the Galerie des Glaces, from which he could easily be summoned if she had a mind to grant him an audience.

The long gallery was crowded with courtiers and their ladies, and Roger was immediately struck by the contrast of the calm that reigned among them to the commotion going on outside the palace. Faultlessly attired, bowing to each other with urbane grace as they met, parted or offered their snuff-boxes, they were talking of the latest scandals, gaming parties, books, Opera—in fact of everything other than the political upheaval that menaced their privileges, and incomes. Roger did not know whether to admire their well-bred detachment—which was quite possibly assumed so as not to alarm the women—or dub them a pack of idle, irresponsible fools.

An hour later there was a call for silence, the ushers rapped sharply on the parquet with their wands, and the occupants of the gallery formed into two long lines, facing inwards. As the King and Queen entered the women sank to the floor in curtsys and the men behind them bowed low. The Sovereigns then walked slowly down the human lane that had been formed, giving a nod here, a smile there and occasion­ally pausing to say a word to someone.

Roger had never before seen the King so close, and he was no more impressed than he had been at a distance. Louis XVT was then nearly thirty-five, but owing to his bulk he looked considerably older. He was heavily built and now grossly fat, both in figure and face, from years of overeating. His curved, fleshy nose and full mouth were typical of the Bourbon family; his double chin receded and his mild grey eyes protruded. Even his walk was awkward and he lacked the dignity which might have made a stupid man at least appear kingly.

To Roger's disappointment the Queen did not, apparently, recognize him, and, having reached the end of the human lane, the royal couple passed out of a door at the far end of the gallery; so he feared that he had had his wait for nothing. But presently de Vaudreuil came to fetch him, and led him to the petit appartements: a series of small, low-ceilinged private rooms adjacent to die Queen's vast State bedchamber. Her waiting-woman, Madame Campan, took him into a little boudoir, where Madame Marie Antoinette was sitting reading through some papers.

He thought her looking tired and ill, but she greeted him with her habitual kindness, and obviously made an effort to show interest in the journey he had undertaken for her. When he had given a brief account of it, she expressed concern at his having been wounded, asked after her brother, and then said:

"You find us in a sad state here, Mr. Brook, but that is no reason why I should fail to reward you for the service you have rendered me.

"If that is Your Majesty's gracious pleasure," he replied at once, "I have two requests to make, one for myself and one for another."

As she signed to him to go on, he continued: "On my first coming to France I sailed in an English smuggler's craft. She was sunk off Le Havre by a French warship and the crew taken prisoner. The captain's name was Dan Izzard, and I imagine that he and his men were sent to the galleys. They may be dead or have escaped long ere this, but Dan was a good fellow, and if Your Majesty "

With a wave of her hand she cut him short. "At least le bon Dieu still permits the Queen of France to perform an act of mercy at the request of a friend. Give all particulars to Monsieur de Vaudreuil and if these men are still our prisoners I will have them released and repatriated. And for yourself, Monsieur ?"

Roger bowed. " 'Tis only, Madame, your permission to remain unobtrusively about the Court, in the hope that I may be of some further service to Your Majesty."

She smiled rather wanly. "I grant that readily; although I warn you, Mr. Brook, that in these days the Court of Versailles is but a poor place in which to seek advancement. We are having all we can do to maintain ourselves."

As Roger was about to reply the door was flung open and the King came lumbering in. Ignoring Roger and Madame Campan, he cried:

"What do you think, Madame D'Esprenénil has just been to see me."

The Queen sighed. "To offer more advice, I suppose; and no doubt contrary to the innumerable opinions we have heard so far."

Pulling a large handkerchief from his pocket the King began to mop his red, perspiring face. "But what do you think he said, Madame; what do you think he said? He wants me to summon the Parliament of Paris, of whose loyalty he now assures me; march on the city with my troops, surround the Palais Royal, seize my cousin of Orleans and his confederates, try them summarily and hang them to the nearest lamp­posts. He says that if I will do that the people will be too stunned to rise against us. That I could then dissolve the National Assembly as unfaithful to its mandates; and that if I will grant by royal edict all reasonable reforms the Parliament will register them, the country be pacified, and the monarchy established on a firm foundation."

"Worse advice has been offered to other Monarchs who found themselves in similar difficulties," said the Queen quietly.

"But Madame 1" the harassed man exclaimed in alarm. "Because I dislike and distrust my cousin, that would be no excuse for hanging him. Besides, such a tyrannical act could not possibly be carried through without innocent persons becoming embroiled in it. We might even have to fire on the crowds and kill a number of the people. The people love me and in no circumstances will I allow their blood to be shed. They are not disloyal, but simply misguided. No! No! If blood is to be shed I would rather that it were my own. You at least agree with me about that, do you not, Madame?"

The Queen inclined her head. "Sire, you know well that you have my full understanding and approval of any measures that you think fit to take. What reply did you make to Monsieur d' Espreménil ?"

"I—I thanked him for his advice," faltered the unhappy King, "and told him that we were opposed to extreme measures; but would think about it. You see, Madame, I did not wish to offend him, as I am sure that he meant well. I am much relieved that you feel as I do. I pray you excuse me now, for I am due to listen to a lecture from that depressing Monsieur Necker."

The King made an awkward bow to his wife, and hurried like a naughty schoolboy from the room. There was silence for a moment, then the Queen said to Roger:

"Had you been the King, Mr. Brook, what would you have thought of Monsieur d'Espreménil's advice?"

"I would have taken it, Madame, and acted upon it this very night," replied Roger without hesitation. "But may it please Your Majesty to understand me. I have little sympathy for your nobles, and still Jess for the majority of your clergy. Both Orders have become parasites, and I believe that the only sound future for France lies in utilizing the brains and initiative of the Third Estate. But it should not be allowed to usurp the royal prerogative. Since things have gone so far, I think His Majesty would be justified in taking any measures— however violent—to silence His Highness of Orleans and restore the authority of the monarchy."

The Queen nodded noncommittally. "You are not alone in your opinion, Mr. Brook; but His Majesty's feelings are also mine. You may leave me now; and in future I shall see you with pleasure among the gentlemen of our Court."

As Roger rode back to Paris he felt sad for the French nobles; for, although he found little to admire in them as a body, he would have hated to be one of them and have to rely for support on such a sorry King. His pessimistic view of their chances was confirmed the very next day.

Barentin had won the round over the speech at the Royal Session, but Necker got the upper hand in the one that followed. At his insistence the King wrote to the Presidents of the Two senior Orders, the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld and the Due de Luxembourg, asking them to invite their members to join the Third. Both demurred, so he sent for and pleaded with them. Still they held out, preferring his displeasure, and the howls of execration of the mob wherever they appeared, to a surrender that they considered to be against the true interests of the nation.

The King then panicked and resorted to a stratagem which came near to baseness. He ordered his brother, the Comte d'Artois, whom the nobles regarded as the leader of their resistance, to write a letter stating that if they persisted further in their refusal His Majesty's life would be in danger from the fury of the populace. The letter was read in the chamber of the nobles on the morning of the 27th. The gallant Marquis de St. Simon instantly sprang to his feet and cried: "If that be the case, let us go to him and form a rampart round him with our bodies." But the majority were against provoking an armed conflict; so, although with the greatest reluctance, out of personal loyalty to their Sovereign, the remaining members of the two senior Orders were tricked into joining the National Assembly.

That it was a shameful manoeuvre Roger had no doubt, as he was in Versailles at the time with every opportunity to assess the facts; and he knew that there was as yet little real strength behind the noisy rabble, whereas the Court still had ample power to suppress any serious disturbance.

For a week past bands of hooligans had been parading the streets creating disorder, and threatening anyone they saw whom they believed to be opposed to their idol, Monsieur Necker. In the neighbourhood of the park the peasants now defied the gamekeepers; three poachers had been brutally butchered, one of them only a few days previously, and the villagers round about were openly shooting the game in the royal forests. The whole country was in a state of extreme agitation, and during the past four months over 300 outbreaks of violence had occurred in different parts of it.

Even the French Royal Guard were no longer to be relied upon, as the agents of the Due d'Orleans were employing women as well as men to stir up sedition, and great numbers of the prostitutes of Paris were being used to suborn the troops. Both in the capital and at Versailles it was now a common sight to see groups of guardsmen arm-in-arm with girls, drunk in the middle of the day, and shouting obscenities, picked up in the gardens of the Palais Royal, against the Queen. Moreover it was known that a secret society had been formed in the regiment, the members of which had sworn to obey no orders except those emanating from the National Assembly.

But, despite all this, not a voice, much less a finger, had as yet been raised against the King. Every time he gave way he won a new, if temporary, popularity, and even when he stood firm there was no decrease in the respect shown to him. He had 40,000 troops within a few hours' march of the capital. The discipline of his Royal Swiss Guard was superb, and he had several other regiments of Swiss and German troops who had long been embodied in the French Army in the immediate vicinity. As they did not speak French they understood little of what was going on, could not be tampered with, and were entirely reliable. He therefore had nothing whatever to fear and must have known it from the fact that whenever he appeared even the rabble still greeted him with shouts of "Vive le Roi!"

So he had betrayed his nobility, and deprived them of all further opportunity to exercise a restraining influence on the extremists of the Third Estate, solely for the sake of escaping a little further badgering from a Minister whom he disliked and distrusted, yet had not the courage to dismiss.

Of his abysmal weakness further evidence was soon forthcoming. The Due de Chatelet, Colonel of the French Guard, much perturbed by the open disaffection of his regiment, arrested fifteen of the ring­leaders and confined them in the prison of l’Abbaye. One of them managed to get a letter smuggled out to the Palais Royal. On its contents becoming public a tumult ensued, the mob marched upon the prison, forced its doors, released the offenders and carried them back in triumph.

Since the elections the revolutionary Clubs in Paris had gained enormously in strength, and they used as their mouthpiece a body of the Electors who had made their headquarters at the Hotel de Ville. Instead of dispersing after having elected their deputies to the Third Estate these Electors continued to sit, forming an unofficial but most powerful committee, who, every day, deluged their representatives in the National Assembly with a constant spate of requests and orders. The Electors now demanded that the Assembly should use its weight with the King to secure the pardon of the mutinous guardsmen. This the Assembly, now itself frightened of the mobs that the Electors controlled, was sapient enough to do; and the miserable King acceded to their request, thereby destroying at a stroke the authority of the officers of his own regiment of guards.

Roger now went daily to Versailles. He would have moved to lodgings there if he could, but ever since the assembling of the States

General the town had been packed to capacity and every garret in it occupied; so he often had to ride back to Paris in the small hours of the morning.

His temporary captivity at Fontainebleau now stood him in good stead, as the courtiers he had met through de Vaudreuil extended their friendship to him, introduced him to their families, and invited him to their parties. For, in spite of the troubled times, life within the palace went on as usual, except that there were no public entertainments owing to the Court being in mourning for the Dauphin. Twice the Duchesse de Polignac invited him to musical evenings in her suite, and on both occasions the Queen spoke kindly to him. He now saw her, although not to speak to, several times a day, and his affable manners rapidly gained for him an accepted place among the fifty or sixty people whom she regarded as her personal friends.

In consequence, he was now admirably placed for learning what was going on, and he soon became aware that the Court party was by no means yet prepared to knuckle under to the National Assembly. The Marshal de Broglie, a stout-hearted veteran of the Seven Years' War, had been appointed to the supreme command of the Army, and he meant to stand no nonsense if the mobs of Paris took up arms against the King. The Queen's old friend, de Besenval, had been selected to command the troops in the capital, and between them they now had 50,000 men concentrated in and about it.

Most people at the Court now felt that, unless the King's timidity led him to an abject surrender of every right still vested in the Crown, civil war must soon break out. They also believed that, although he might be prepared to do so on his own account, his jelly-like back would be stiffened for once at the thought that his powers did not belong to himself alone, but were held by him in trust for transmission to his children and future heirs as yet unborn.

De Broglie and his staff were therefore preparing against all emergen­cies with the utmost activity. The palace and its grounds were now an armed camp. Batteries were being erected to cover the bridges over the Seine and thousands of men were labouring to throw up a vast system of earthworks on the slopes of Montmartre, from which guns could bombard rebellious Paris.

Roger kept Mr. Hailes informed of all the details he could gather, but the main facts were common knowledge and, not unnaturally, the National Assembly took alarm at these military measures, believing their purpose to be the intimidation of themselves. De Mirabeau voted an address to the King asking that the troops be withdrawn.

On July 10th the Monarch replied that the troops had been assembled only for the purpose of preventing further disorders, and that if the Assembly had any fears for its security it had his permission to remove to Noyon or Soissons. Then, on the night of the 11th, he at last plucked up the courage to dismiss Necker.

When the news reached the Palais Royal next day pandemonium broke loose. Fuel was added to the fire by the tidings that Montmorin, St. Priest and other Ministers who had supported Necker's policy had been dismissed with him; and that the Baron de Breteuil, one of the Queen's intimates, had been appointed principal Minister in his place.

Leaping on to a table, with a brace of pistols in his hands, Camille Desmoulins harangued the crowd, inciting them to insurrection. D'Orleans' swarthy ruffians from the South and a number of deserters from the Gardes Francois reinforced the mob, which surged through the streets, burst into the Hotel de Ville and seized all the arms there. For the rest of the day and far into the night anarchy reigned in Paris. The lawless multitude broke open the prisons, looted the shops and burnt the hated customs barriers at all the entrances to the city.

De Besenval, believing that he would pay for it with his own head if he ordered his troops to attack the people without the royal authority, sent courier after courier to Versailles for instructions. But the King was out hunting and, even when he did return, could not be prevailed upon to give any. Meanwhile de Besenval's men had begun to fraternize with the rioters and were deserting by the score; so, as the only means of stopping the rot, he withdrew his troops during the night to the open country.

On the morning of the 13th Roger set off as usual for Versailles; but when he reached the last houses of the city he found that the road was blocked by a barricade of overturned carts, looted furniture and paving stones. It was manned by an armed rabble who would allow no one to pass in either direction, and were seizing all would-be travellers to rob them of their valuables. Roger's horse saved him from such treatment, but his fine clothes excited shouts of hatred and he did not get away without a shower of stones being hurled at him.

Returning to his inn he changed into his most sober garments, then went out again to discover what was going forward. He soon learned that every exit of the city was in the hands of the mob and that they now regarded Paris as a beleaguered city. Somewhat uneasily he wondered when the bombardment from the royal artillery on the heights of Montmartre would commence; and cursed the idiocy of the King, who a week before could have put an end to the seditions of the Palais Royal with a company of troops, done so yesterday morning with a battalion, but to achieve the same end now would need to employ an army.

In the gardens of the Palais Royal he saw to his surprise that every chestnut tree was entirely stripped of its leaves; but a waiter at one of the cafes told him that green being the colour of the Due d'Orleans,

Camille Desmoulins had, the day before, plucked a leaf and stuck it in his buttonhole, upon which the crowd had swarmed up the trees and decorated themselves with similar symbols before rushing off to the Hotel de Ville.

The habitual loungers in the garden being now otherwise occupied, it was almost deserted, so Roger decided to go to the Hotel de Ville, as the new centre of the mob's inspiration. He found it surrounded by a seething mass of people, and only after two hours of persistent pushing managed to edge his way inside.

From scraps of conversation that he picked up it emerged that the Electors were now alarmed both for themselves and the city. Events were taking the course usual in revolutions. The more Liberal nobles, and the aristocratic lawyers of the old Parliament, had first opposed the King: they had been pushed aside by the more advanced reformers of the Third Estate; in its turn the Third Estate had recently shown signs of becoming dominated by the Left-wing element of the Clubs and Electors; and now the Electors found themselves at the mercy of the mob.

However, the Electors were mostly men of some substance, and they were determined not to allow further property to be destroyed if they could possibly prevent it. Quite arbitrarily they had virtually taken over the functions of the Municipality, of Paris, but they now sought the aid of Monsieur de Flesselles, the Provost of the Merchants, and other officials of the city. De Flesselles, with a bravery that was soon to cost him dear, succeeded in getting rid of the major portion of the rioters by telling them that large quantities of arms were to be had for the taking in various places where, in fact, no arms were stored; and, in the meantime, the Electors hurriedly pushed forward a project upon which they had agreed two days earlier.

This was the formation of a Civic Guard, to consist of 200 men per district—12,000 men in all. The idea had been conceived with the object of creating a counterpoise to the royal troops, and, if necessary, giving armed support to the National Assembly; but it was now put into operation for the defence of the lives and properties of respectable citizens. By nightfall skeleton companies of the new militia were patrolling tie streets in the better quarters, but the mob still reigned supreme in the faubourgs;and in the gardens of the Palais Royala drunken orgy was taking place by the light of thousands of ecus'worth of fireworks, which d'Orleans' agents were selling to the people at one quarter of their normal cost.

After the better part of two hours in the Hotel de Ville, Roger had forced his way out of it and returned to his inn. Tired from the press of the crowd and its shouting, much worried by the turn events had taken, and no longer buoyed up by his old love of excitement, he ate a meal in solitary silence, then went up to his room and endeavoured to read a book. He was still wondering when the bombardment would open, but the King had been out hunting again all that day and on his return to the palace declared himself too fatigued to attend to business; so the only explosions that disturbed the stillness in Paris on that summer night were made by the rockets and Roman candles let off by the rowdies at the Palais Royal.

Next morning Roger's enquiries produced the information that, although the mobs were still in possession of a large part of the city, the milice bourgeoise had succeeded in restoring order in its western end and demolished the barricades on the roads leading out of it. So he had his horse saddled and rode to Versailles.

He found the town unexpectedly quiet and, to his amazement, that the occupants of the palace were going about their normal routine as though nothing had occurred to disturb it in the last two days. The people he talked to were aware that there had been riots in the city, but they did not regard them with any more seriousness than they had the minor disturbances that had been taking place there for some months past. In vain he endeavoured to bring home to several of the courtiers the imminence of the peril that now threatened the whole structure of the State, but they merely offered him their snuff-boxes and assured him blandly that "now that vain, blundering fool Necker has gone everything will soon be put to rights".

Later in the day the sound of cannon could be clearly heard from the direction of Paris. A report came through that the mob were attacking both the Invalides and the Bastille in the hope of obtaining further supplies of arms and ammunition. The courtiers now smiled a little grimly, and said that a few round-shot fired from the towers of the Bastille would soon teach the people better manners.

Early in the evening the usual royal progress was made through the long Hall of Mirrors. It had only just begun when the Due de Liancourt, booted, spurred and covered with dust, arrived on the scene. Thrusting his way through the satin-clad throng he addressed the King without ceremony:

"Sire! I have to inform you that the people have sacked the Invalides, and with the arms so obtained stormed and captured the Bastille."

"Bon Dieu!" exclaimed the startled Kong. "It is then a revolt."

" 'Tis not a revolt, Sire," retorted the Due acidly. "It is a revolu­tion."

De Liancourt was one of the most Liberal-minded nobles, and also suspected of Orleanist tendencies, so the obvious concern with which he announced the news was all the more striking; but he knew little of what had occurred apart from the bare facts.

Hard on his heels came de Besenval, with a more substantial account, which had been furnished by the agents he had left behind him on his withdrawal from the city. The King suggested to the Queen that they should retire with the Ministers to hear the news in private; so accom­panied by de Besenval, de Breteuil, de Broglie, and a few others, they withdrew amidst the never-failing ceremonial bows and curtsys that took place at their every movement.

But the details soon leaked out. Having secured a few cannon from the arsenal at the Invalides the mob had marched to the Bastille with the object of obtaining further weapons. The Marquis de Launay, who was governor of the fortress, had refused their demands and threatened to fire upon them. They had then attacked the approaches to the castle with great determination, and succeeded in severing the chains that held up the outer drawbridge. De Launay's garrison consisted of only 32 Swiss and 80 pensioners, and his cannon were ancient pieces no longer of value except for firing salutes; so he offered to admit a deputa­tion to parley provided that they undertook to attempt no violence while within the fortress. This being agreed a group numbering 40 were admitted, and the inner drawbridge drawn up behind them. As to what next occurred, accounts varied widely. Some said that de Launay had massacred the deputation, but as such an act of brutality could have done him little good it seemed most unlikely. The more probable version was that a nervous gunner had allowed his match to get too near the touch-hole of a cannon that was trained on the deputation as an insurance against their possible treachery, and that the piece, fired by accident, killed a number of them.

In any case the mob outside, believing itself to have been deliberately betrayed, placed such cannon as it had against the gates, blew them in, and stormed through the debris with ungovernable fury. At the sight of them de Launay snatched a lighted match from one of his gunners and ran towards the powder-magazine with the intention of blowing the fortress up; but he was seized by his own men, who then surrendered to the mob on a promise that his life and their own should be respected.

The French Guard deserters who were present, and had done most of the fighting on the side of the attackers, showed great bravery in endeavouring to protect de Launay and carry out the terms of the surrender. But the canaille overcame them, and dragged the Governor to the Place de Grive, where criminals were habitually executed, and murdered him there with great brutality; afterwards cutting off his head and parading it in triumph on the point of a pike round the gardens of the Palais Royal.

The gunner who had fired upon the deputation, and several of his companions, were also butchered. In addition, that same evening, another mob had called Monsieur de Flesselles to account for sending them on a wild-goose chase when they had been seeking arms the day before. Having hauled him from the Hotel de Ville, they were marching him away to try him at the Palais Royal when he was shot by an unknown hand. Thereupon they hacked off his head and carried it to join de Launay's in the garden where so much infamy had been plotted.

On hearing of these wild scenes Roger did not feel at all inclined to return to Paris that night, so he gladly accepted the offer of a shake­down in the apartments of the Duc de Coigny. Next morning news came in that the barriers outside Paris had been re-erected, and that the Civic Guard were now refusing anyone entrance. De Coigny then told Roger that he was welcome to occupy his temporary quarters for as long as he liked, so Roger thanked him and went out into the town to buy some toilet articles and fresh linen.

When he returned he heard that the National Assembly had again sent an address to the King, asking him to withdraw his troops from the vicinity of the capital as the only means of restoring order; and that their request had met with a refusal. But later in the day the unstable Monarch changed his mind and gave way. That evening the sang-froid of even the courtiers was shaken and, although they still preserved appearances by talking of idle topics with their ladies, an atmosphere of gloom pervaded the whole Court.

On the 16th the full extent of the Court party's defeat became apparent. The additional regiments that had been brought into Versailles were evacuating the town. The Marshal de Broglie was deprived of his command. De Breteuil, Barentin and the other royalist Ministers were dismissed. A courier was despatched post-haste to Switzerland to recall the now inevitable alternative, Monsieur Necker.

Feeling depressed by the long faces in the palace, Roger went that afternoon to the National Assembly. The scenes he witnesed there appalled him. He realized now how right Monsieur de Perigord's forecast had been that, lacking all experience in parliamentary pro­cedure, when the States General met it would resemble a bear-pit. No rules of conduct for debates had been laid down and none were observed. Often as many as fifty deputies were all on their feet at once endeavour­ing to shout one another down; and when at last one of them did get a hearing he did not speak as a participator in a prearranged debate; instead he held the floor for as long as he could, pouring out all the ideas for the regeneration of France which were uppermost in his mind at the moment. In consequence his hearers might wish to support some things he said while violently disagreeing with him about others; so that when a division was finally called for, two-thirds of the members were not clear in their minds upon what they were voting.

Still worse, the public galleries were packed with spectators and no attempt whatever was made to keep them in order. They shouted witticisms and gave loud cat-calls; yelled for deputies to speak who had not risen, cheered their favourites and booed those they suspected of holding reactionary opinions. With such an audience, mainly com­posed of roughs and agitators, it was clearly impossible for moderate men to state their views without being subject to intimidation.

Horrified as Roger was by this travesty of parliamentary govern­ment, he was so fascinated by the spectacle that he remained watching it much longer than he had intended. When he came out it was getting dark, and the hour for supper in the palace had already passed, so he decided to get a meal in the town before rejoining his friends.

As he walked back to the palace, in the great square upon which it faced, several hundred people, among whom were many French Guards accompanied by loose women, were busy starting bonfires. The fever of revolution which still gripped Paris had spread, and groups of drunken roisterers were now singing ribald songs about the Queen under her very windows.

Sadly, Roger went up the great staircase, and made his way to de Vaudreuil's rooms. To his surprise he found his friend throwing books, boots and pistols higgledy-piggledy into a big trunk.

"What in the world are you about ?" he asked anxiously.

"Packing my own things, as I have sent my man to get my coach," replied the Count tersely.

"Indeed! And where are you off to in such a hurry?"

"Germany! Holland! England! Heaven knows, for I do not."

"Come," Roger insisted. "I beg you make yourself plain."

"I thought that I had done so. I am going into exile."

"Exile!"

"Yes. I have been banished. An hour since Her Majesty told me to pack this very night and leave the country."

"But you are one of her oldest friends. How could you possibly have offended her to such a degree?"

"I spoke my mind too freely. For weeks past her brother, the Emperor Joseph, has sent letter after letter, urging her to take refuge with him in Vienna from the hatred of the people. This evening I told her plainly that it was useless to rely further upon the Kong. That he is constitutionally unfitted to cope with the problems with which he is faced. That she must either raise the standard of the monarchy herself and let us draw our swords in its defence, or seek safety in flight. She replied that she had complete faith in His Majesty's judgment, would never abandon him or the station to which God had called her, and would not suffer to remain in her presence anyone who spoke ill of her husband; therefore I was to proceed abroad immediately."

"She cannot have meant that!" cried Roger impetuously. "She is distressed beyond measure by events, and cannot have realized the full import of what she said. At such a time she more than ever needs her true friends round her. I beg you to ignore her order; for I vow you will find that she has repented of it by tomorrow."

De Vaudreuil frowned, shook his head, and said sadly: "Nay. I have long been wearied of the Court and its futile ways. I have wasted half a lifetime bowing and posturing with a lot of other fools who have now brought calamity upon themselves. I have served her to the best of my ability, and would serve her still if she would but listen to the dictates of her own high courage instead of playing the loyal, subservient wife to that poor stupid man whom fate has made our King. But since she will not, did I remain I should only add to her distress by telling her further truths that she knows already; so 'tis best that I should go."

In vain Roger argued and pleaded, so at length he left the Count to continue with his packing. Yet he knew that de Vaudreuil loved the Queen with a selfless devotion, and in recent weeks his own heart had ached so much for Isabella, that now, from sympathetic understanding, it ached for his friend.

He could not bear the thought that the Queen and her faithful knight should part in anger, so after a while he summoned all his resolution and went to her apartments.

Madame Campan opened the door of the ante-chamber to his knock. On his requesting an audience on an urgent matter she looked at him in astonishment and said that she could not take his name in at that hour, and that in any case the Duchesse de Polignac was closeted with Her Majesty.

At that moment the Duchesse came out. She was holding a handker­chief to her eyes and weeping bitterly. Roger again urged Madame Campan to beg the Queen to see him for a moment and at length she reluctantly consented.

She returned after a moment to say that the Queen was about to retire for the night, and could see no one. With his usual persistence when he had made up his mind to do anything, Roger said that he had been sent on a matter of the greatest urgency by Monsieur de Vaudreuil. Again Madame Campan reluctantly gave way. When she came back the second time she opened the door wide and led him without a word across the room to the great gilded double doors at its far end. At her touch one of them swung back a few feet, and he stepped through into the huge, lofty, ornate chamber, in which the Queen both slept and held her morning receptions.

Madame Marie Antoinette was sitting at her dressing-table, her head bowed between her hands, crying. As she turned to look at him her blue eyes were dim and the tears were still running down her cheeks. In that vast apartment she now seemed a small pathetic figure. Roger was suddenly conscious of an extraordinary urge to run to her and put his arms protectively about her.

Repressing this symptom of madness that she inspired in men, he made her three formal bows and waited to be addressed.

After a moment she said in a low voice: "You—you bring me a message from Monsieur de Vaudreuil."

"I most humbly beg Your Majesty to pardon me," he replied. " 'Tis not Monsieur de Vaudreuil's words I bring, only his thoughts; and those upon my own responsibility. He is distressed beyond measure at your treatment of him."

The Queen drew herself up. "Monsieur 1 How dare you force your way in here, and require me to explain my conduct!"

Roger went down on one knee, and bowed his head. "Madame, I come but to implore you to forgive him."

She put her handkerchief to her eyes, brushed away fresh tears, and said more quietly: "I did no more than my plain duty in reprimanding him for what he said."

Throwing discretion to the winds, Roger burst out: "But, Madame! He has been so long in your service. He loves you so dearly. He would, I know, give his life for you without a moment's hesitation. How could you find it in your heart to treat him with such harshness? 'Tis one thing to administer a rebuke, but quite another to send a faithful servant into exile because he has spoken over boldly, and at that solely from his devotion to you."

For a full minute there was silence, while Roger continued to kneel, his eyes fixed on the floor. Then she said:

"Be pleased to rise, Mr. Brook. I thank you for coming to me. It will enable me to repair a misunderstanding which I should deeply regret. I spoke to Monsieur de Vaudreuil upon two matters. Firstly in reply to the uncalled-for advice he offered me; secondly regarding his own future. But neither had any connection with the other. I now see that in his distress at having incurred my displeasure, my poor friend must have confused the two. I told him that he must leave my service, only because His Majesty and I have decided that France is no longer safe for anyone who has shown us personal—devotion."

The Queen choked upon the word and began to weep again; but after a few moments she restrained her tears, and went on: " 'Tis said that in Paris there are already placards up demanding the head of Monsieur le Comte d'Artois; so the King has ordered his brother to leave the country. He has done the like with the Prince de Cond6, and the Prince de Conti; with Monsieur de Breteuil, the Marshal de Broglie and a score of others. I have but this moment parted from my dear friend the Duchesse de Polignac."

Once more her tears checked her speech, but she struggled to continue. "The de Coignys, de Ligne; all those we love we are sending abroad for their own safety. They begged to stay, but the King helped me to persuade a number of them only a few minutes after de Vaudreuil had left me. In the end His Majesty had to command them, and he urged them to depart without losing a moment. You, too, Mr. Brook, must go. Short as your time has been here, you are already known as one of those they call 'the party of the accursed Queen'. Think kindly of me sometimes, I beg; but leave me now and make all speed to England."

There was nothing Roger could say; and, his own eyes now half blinded by unshed tears, he bowed very low.

As he was about to make his second bow she impulsively stood up, and thrust her handkerchief into his hand.

"Give this, please, to de Vaudreuil," she stammered. "Tell him that I have shed many tears tonight; but that the first to fall on it were those I shed at the thought of having had to send him away."

The moment Madame Campan had closed the door of the ante­room behind Roger, he hurried back to de Vaudreuil's room. But he was too late. Both the trunk and its owner were gone. A mass of only partially torn up letters left scattered about the floor told of his hurried departure.

In the hope of catching his friend Roger ran through the long corridors, down the great staircase, and out on to the steps at the main entrance of the palace. But the Cour de Marbre was empty and no coach in sight.

Beyond the railings the square was now brightly lit by the bonfires. Like the nightmare figures at a Witches' Sabbat men and women with linked arms were wildly dancing round them. Their drunken shouts made hideous the summer night.

In his hand Roger still clutched a small, damp handkerchief.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

UNEASY INTERLUDE

ROGER did not even contemplate following the Queen's injunction to set off for England; his duty to his own master quite clearly lay in remaining at the centre of events. The problem that exercised him now was, since he could no longer remain in the palace, how was he going to get back to Paris unmolested?

Having decided to sleep upon it he went to his temporary quarters with the de Coignys. The suite of rooms was in disorder and the Due and Duchesse gone. A footman told him with a pert grin that they had left half an hour before by a side entrance of the palace, as plenty of other fine people were doing that night. Roger worked off a little of his nervy unhappiness by taking the insolent fellow by the scruff of the neck and kicking him out of the room. Then he undressed, got into the Duke's bed and soon fell asleep.