My thrifty father had not seen fit to furnish me any money to throw away in the follies of the town.  He had calculated closely what I should need to take me to Monsieur, with a little margin for accidents; so that, after paying Maitre Jacques, I had hardly two pieces to jingle together.

For three years I had browsed my fill in the duke’s library; I could write a decent letter both in my own tongue and in Italian, thanks to Father Francesco, Monsieur’s Florentine confessor, and handle a sword none so badly, thanks to Monsieur; and I felt that it should not be hard to pick up a livelihood.  But how to start about it I had no notion, and finally I made up my mind to go and consult him whom I now called my one friend in Paris, Jacques the innkeeper.

’Twas easier said than done.  I had strayed out of the friendly Rue St. Denis into a network of dark and narrow ways that might have been laid out by a wily old stag with the dogs hot on him, so did they twist and turn and double on themselves.  I could make my way only at a snail’s pace, asking new guidance at every corner.  Noon was long past when at length I came on laggard feet around the corner by the Amour de Dieu.

Yet was it not fatigue that weighted my feet, but pride.  Though I had resolved to seek out Maitre Jacques, still ’twas a hateful thing to enter as suppliant where I had been the patron.  I had paid for my breakfast like a lord, but I should have to beg for my dinner.  I had bragged of Monsieur’s fondness, and I should have to tell how I had been flung under the coach-wheels.  My pace slackened to a stop.  I could not bring myself to enter the door.  I tried to think how to better my story, so to tell it that it should redound to my credit.  But my invention stuck in my pate.

As I stood striving to summon up a jaunty demeanour, I found myself gazing straight at the shuttered house, and of a sudden my thoughts shifted back to my vision.

Those murdered Huguenots, dead and gone ere I was born, had appeared to me as plain as the men I passed in the street.  Though I had beheld them but the space of a lightning-flash, I could call up their faces like those of my comrades.  One, the nearest me, was small, pale, with pinched, sharp face, somewhat rat-like.  The second man was conspicuously big and burly, black-haired and-bearded.  The third and youngest—­all three were young—­stood with his hand on Blackbeard’s shoulder.  He, too, was tall, but slenderly built, with clear-cut visage and fair hair gleaming in the glare.  One moment I saw them, every feature plain; the next they had vanished like a dream.

It was an unholy thing, no doubt, yet it held me with a shuddery fascination.  Was it indeed a portent, this rising of heretics from their unblessed graves?  And why had it been shown to me, true son of the Church?  Had any one else ever seen what I had seen?  Maitre Jacques had hinted at further terrors, and said no one dared enter the place.  Well, grant me but the opportunity, and I would dare.