Louis sprang impatiently from his chair, and caught up his cane.  “I wish,” said he, “that you would imitate these people who seem to you to be so formidable, in their excellent habit of doing things for themselves.  The matter may stand until our council.  Reverend father, it has struck the hour of chapel, and all else may wait until we have paid out duties to heaven.”  Taking a missal from the hands of an attendant, he walked as fast as his very high heels would permit him, towards the door, the court forming a lane through which he might pass, and then closing up behind to follow him in order of precedence.

CHAPTER III.

THE HOLDING OF THE DOOR.

Whilst Louis had been affording his court that which he had openly stated to be the highest of human pleasures—­the sight of the royal face—­the young officer of the guard outside had been very busy passing on the titles of the numerous applicants for admission, and exchanging usually a smile or a few words of greeting with them, for his frank, handsome face was a well-known one at the court.  With his merry eyes and his brisk bearing, he looked like a man who was on good terms with Fortune.  Indeed, he had good cause to be so, for she had used him well.  Three years ago he had been an unknown subaltern bush-fighting with Algonquins and Iroquois in the wilds of Canada.  An exchange had brought him back to France and into the regiment of Picardy, but the lucky chance of having seized the bridle of the king’s horse one winter’s day in Fontainebleau when the creature was plunging within a few yards of a deep gravel-pit had done for him what ten campaigns might have failed to accomplish.  Now as a trusted officer of the king’s guard, young, gallant, and popular, his lot was indeed an enviable one.  And yet, with the strange perversity of human nature, he was already surfeited with the dull if magnificent routine of the king’s household, and looked back with regret to the rougher and freer days of his early service.  Even there at the royal door his mind had turned away from the frescoed passage and the groups of courtiers to the wild ravines and foaming rivers of the West, when suddenly his eyes lit upon a face which he had last seen among those very scenes.

“Ah, Monsieur de Frontenac!” he cried.  “You cannot have forgotten me.”

“What!  De Catinat!  Ah, it is a joy indeed to see a face from over the water!  But there is a long step between a subaltern in the Carignan and a captain in the guards.  You have risen rapidly.”

“Yes; and yet I may be none the happier for it.  There are times when I would give it all to be dancing down the Lachine Rapids in a birch canoe, or to see the red and the yellow on those hill-sides once more at the fall of the leaf.”