That they should part thus was too miserable to be endured.  I was sure Monsieur’s question was no accusation, but the groping of bewilderment.

“M.  Etienne, stop!” I commanded.  “Monsieur, it is the truth.  Indeed it is the truth.  He is innocent, and Lucas is a Guise.  Monsieur, you must listen to me.  M. Etienne, you must wait.  I stirred up the whole trouble with my story to you, Monsieur, and I take it back.  I believed I was telling the truth.  I was wrong.  When I left you, I went straight back to the Rue Coupejarrets to kill your son—­your murderer, I thought.  And there I found Grammont and Lucas side by side.  We thought them sworn foes:  they were hand in glove.  They came at me to end me because I had told, and M. Etienne saved me.  Lucas mocked him to his face because he had been tricked; Lucas bragged that it was his own scheme—­that M. Etienne was his dupe.  Vigo will tell you.  Vigo heard him.  His scheme was to saddle M. Etienne with your murder.  He was tricked.  He believed what he told me—­that the thing was a duel between Lucas and Grammont.  You must believe it, Monsieur!”

M. Etienne, who had actually obeyed me,—­me, his lackey,—­turned to his father once again.

“Monsieur, if you cannot believe me, believe Felix.  You believed him when he took away my good name.  Believe him now when he restores it.”

“Nay,” Monsieur cried; “I believe thee, Etienne.”

And he took his son in his arms.

XXII

The signet of the king.

Already a wan light was revealing the round tops of the plum-trees in M. de Mirabeau’s garden, the high gray wall, and the narrow alleyway beneath it.  And the two vague shapes by me were no longer vague shapes, but were turning moment by moment, as if coming out of an enchantment, into their true forms.  It really was Monsieur in the flesh, with a wet glint in his eyes as he kissed his boy.

Neither thought of me, and it was none of my concern what they said to each other.  I went a rod or two down the lane, round a curve in the wall, and watched the bands of light streaking the eastern sky, in utter content.  Never before had the world seemed to me so good a place.  Since this misery had come right, I knew all the rest would; I should yet dance at M. Etienne’s wedding.

I leaned my head back against the wall, and had shut my eyes to consider the matter more quietly, when I heard my name.

“Felix!  Felix!  Where is the boy got to?”

The sun was clean up over the horizon, and as I blinked and wondered how he had contrived the feat so quickly, my two messieurs came hand in hand round the corner to me, the level rays glittering on Monsieur’s burnished breastplate, on M. Etienne’s bright head, and on both their shining faces.  Now that for the first time I saw them together, I found them, despite the dark hair and the yellow, the brown eyes and the gray, wonderfully alike.  There was the same carriage, the same cock of the head, the same smile.  If I had not known before, I knew now, the instant I looked at them, that the quarrel was over.  Save as it gave them a deeper love of each other, it might never have been.