Maitre Menard, then, had told them nothing—­staunch old loyalist.  He knew perfectly that M. le Comte had gone home, and they had throttled him, and yet he had not told.  Well, he should not lose by it.

“Monsieur is about the streets somewhere.  On my life, I know not where.  But I know he will be back here to supper.”

“Oh, you don’t know, don’t you?  Then perhaps Gaspard can quicken your memory.”

At the word the soldier who had attended to Maitre Menard came over to me and taught me how it feels to be hanged.  I said to myself that if I had talked like a dastard I was not one, and every time he let me speak I gasped, “I don’t know.”  The room was black to me, and the sea roared in my ears, and I wondered whether I had done well to tell the lie.  For had I said that my master was in the Hotel St Quentin, still those fellows would have found it no easy job to take him.  Vigo might not be ready to defend Mlle. de Montluc, but he would defend Monsieur’s heir to the last gasp.  Yet I would not yield before the choking Maitre Menard had withstood, and I stuck to my lie.

Then I bethought me, while the room reeled about me and my head seemed like to burst, that perchance if they should keep me here a captive for M. le Comte’s arrival he might really follow to see what had become of me.  I turned sick with the fear of it, and resolved on the truth.  But Gaspard’s last gullet-gripe had robbed me of the power to speak.  I could only pant and choke.  As I struggled painfully for wind, the door was flung open before a tall young man in black.  Through the haze that hung before my vision I saw the soldier seize him as he crossed the threshold.  Through the noise of waters I heard the captain’s cry of triumph.

“Oh, M. Etienne!” I gasped, in agony that my pain had been for nothing.  Now all was lost.  Then the blur lifted, and my amazed eyes beheld not my master, but—­Lucas!

“How now, sirrah?” he cried to the dragoon.  “Hands off me, knaves!” For the second soldier had seized his other arm.

“I regret to inconvenience monsieur,” the captain answered, “but he is wanted at the Bastille.”

“Wanted?  I?” Lucas cried, fear flashing into his eyes.

He felt an instant’s terror, I deem, lest Mayenne had betrayed him.  Quick as he was, he did not see that he had been taken for another man.

“You, monsieur.  You are wanted for the murder of your man, Pontou.”

He grew white, looking instinctively at me, remembering where I had been at three o’clock this morning.

“It is a lie!  He left my service a month back and I have never seen him since.”

“Tell that to the judges,” the captain said, as he had said to me.  “I am not trying you.  The handcuffs, men.”

One of them produced a pair.  Lucas struggled frantically in his captors’ grasp.  He dragged them from one end of the room to the other, calling down all the curses of Heaven upon them; but they snapped the handcuffs on for all that.