“It is more than a rumour,” said Misset.  “It is an order, and most peremptory, from the Court of France, forbidding any officer of Dillon’s regiment to be absent for more than twenty-four hours from his duties on pain of being broke.  Our secret’s out.  That’s the plain truth of the matter.”

He stood by the table drumming with his fingers in a great agitation.  Then his fingers stopped.  He had been drumming upon Wogan’s sheet of paper, and the writing on the sheet had suddenly attracted his notice.  It was writing in unusually regular lines.  Gaydon, arrested by Misset’s change from restlessness to fixity, looked that way for a second, too, but he turned his head aside very quickly.  Wogan’s handwriting was none of his business.

“We will give them a month,” said Wogan, who was conjecturing at the motive of this order from the Court of France.  “No doubt we are suspected.  I never had a hope that we should not be.  The Court of France, you see, can do no less than forbid us, but I should not be surprised if it winks at us on the sly.  We will give them a month.  Colonel Lally is a friend of mine and a friend of the King.  We will get an abatement of that order, so that not one of you shall be cashiered.”

“I don’t flinch at that,” said Misset, “but the secret’s out.”

“Then we must use the more precautions,” said Wogan.  He had no doubt whatever that somehow he would bring the Princess safely out of her prison to Bologna.  It could not be that she was born to be wasted.  Misset, however, was not so confident upon the matter.

“A strange, imperturbable man is Charles Wogan,” said he to Gaydon and O’Toole the same evening.  “Did you happen by any chance to cast your eye over the paper I had my hand on?”

“I did not,” said Gaydon, in a great hurry.  “It was a private letter, no doubt.”

“It was poetry.  There’s no need for you to hurry, my friend.  It was more than mere poetry, it was in Latin.  I read the first line on the page, and it ran, ‘Te, dum spernit, arat novus accola; max ubi cultam—­’”

Gaydon tore his arm away from Misset.  “I’ll hear no more of it,” he cried.  “Poetry is none of my business.”

“There, Dick, you are wrong,” said O’Toole, sententiously.  Both Misset and Gaydon came to a dead stop and stared.  Never had poetry so strange an advocate.  O’Toole set his great legs apart and his arms akimbo.  He rocked himself backwards and forwards on his heels and toes, while a benevolent smile of superiority wrinkled across his broad face from ear to ear.  “Yes, I’ve done it,” said he; “I’ve written poetry.  It is a thing a polite gentleman should be able to do.  So I did it.  It wasn’t in Latin, because the young lady it was written to didn’t understand Latin.  Her name was Lucy, and I rhymed her to ‘juicy,’ and the pleasure of it made her purple in the face.  There were to have been four lines, but there were never more than three and a half because I could not think of a suitable rhyme to O’Toole.  Lucy said she knew one, but she would never tell it me.”