“I had some talk with Major Gaydon which helped me to beguile it,” said Whittington.

“Gaydon!” exclaimed the Chevalier, “are you certain?”

“A man may make mistakes in the darkness,” said Whittington.

“To be sure.”

“And I never had an eye for faces.”

“It was not Gaydon, then?” said the Chevalier.

“It may not have been,” said Whittington, “and by the best of good fortune I said nothing to him of any significance whatever.”

The Chevalier was satisfied with the reply.  He had chosen the right attendant for this nocturnal visit.  Had Gaydon met with a more observant man than Whittington outside the Caprara Palace, he might have got a number of foolish suspicions into his head.

Gaydon, however, was at that moment in his bed, saying to himself that there were many matters concerning which it would be an impertinence for him to have one meddlesome thought.  By God’s blessing he was a soldier and no politician.  He fell asleep comforted by that conclusion.

In the morning Edgar, the Chevalier’s secretary, came privately to him.

“The King will receive you now,” said he.  “Let us go.”

“It is broad daylight.  We shall be seen.”

“Not if the street is empty,” said Edgar, looking out of the window.

The street, as it chanced, was for the moment empty.  Edgar crossed the street and rapped quickly with certain pauses between the raps on the door of that deserted house into which Gaydon had watched men enter.  The door was opened.  “Follow me,” said Edgar.  Gaydon followed him into a bare passage unswept and with discoloured walls.  A man in a little hutch in the wall opened and closed the door with a string.

Edgar walked forward to the end of the passage with Gaydon at his heels.  The two men came to a flight of stone steps, which they descended.  The steps led to a dark and dripping cellar with no pavement but the mud, and that depressed into puddles.  The air was cold and noisome; the walls to the touch of Gaydon’s hand were greasy with slime.  He followed Edgar across the cellar into a sort of tunnel.  Here Edgar drew an end of candle from his pocket and lighted it.  The tunnel was so low that Gaydon, though a shortish man, could barely hold his head erect.  He followed Edgar to the end and up a flight of winding steps.  The air grew warmer and dryer.  They had risen above ground, the spiral wound within the thickness of a wall.  The steps ended abruptly; there was no door visible; in face of them and on each side the bare stone walls enclosed them.  Edgar stooped down and pressed with his finger on a round insignificant discolouration of the stone.  Then he stood up again.