“Good-by—­you are fine boys”; and she slammed the door upon us.  We were in absolute darkness.  As we took our first breath of the dank, foul air, we heard bolts snap into place.

“Well, since we cannot go back, let us go forward,” said M. Etienne, cheerfully.  “I am glad she has bolted the door; it is to throw them off the scent should they track us.”

I knew very well that he was not at all glad; that the same thought which chilled my blood had come to him.  This little beldam, with her beady eyes and her laughter, was the wicked witch of our childhood days; she had shut us up in a charnel-house to die.

I heard him tapping the pavement before him with his scabbard, using it as a blind man’s staff.  And so we advanced through the fetid gloom, the passage being only wide enough to let us walk shoulder to shoulder.  There was a whirring of wings about us, and a squeaking; once something swooped square into my face, knocking a cry of terror from me, and a laugh from him.

“What was it? a bat?  Cheer up, Felix; they don’t bite.”  But I would not go on till I had made sure, as well as I could without seeing, that the cursed thing was not clinging on me somewhere.

We walked on then in silence, the stone walls vibrant with our tread.  We went on till it seemed we had traversed the width of Paris; and I wondered who were sleeping and feasting and scheming and loving over our heads.  M. Etienne said at length: 

“Mordieu!  I hope this snake-hole does not empty us out into the Seine.”  But I thought that as long as it emptied us out somewhere, I should not greatly mind the Seine.

At this very moment M. Etienne clutched my arm, jerking me to a halt.  I bounded backward, trying in the blackness to discern a precipice yawning at my feet.  “Look!” he cried in a low, tense voice.  I perceived, far before us in the gloom, a point of light, which, as we watched it, grew bigger and bigger, till it became an approaching lantern.

“This is like to be awkward,” murmured M. Etienne.

The man carrying the light came on with firm, heavy tread; naturally he did not see us as soon as we saw him.  I thought him alone, but it was hard to tell in this dark, echoy place.

He might easily have approached within touch of my sad clothing without becoming aware of me, but M. Etienne’s azure and white caught the lantern rays a rod away.  The newcomer stopped short, holding up the light between us and his face.  We could make nothing of him, save that he was a large man, soberly clad.

“Who is it?” he demanded, his voice ringing out loud and steady.  “Is it you, Ferou?”

M. Etienne hooked his scabbard in place, and went forward into the clear circle of light.

“No, M. de Mayenne; it is Etienne de Mar.”

“Ventre bleu!” Mayenne ejaculated, changing his lantern with comical alacrity to his left hand, and whipping out his sword.  My master’s came bare, too, at that.  They confronted each other in silence, till Mayenne’s ever-increasing astonishment forced the cry from him: