M. Etienne clutched me by the arm, drawing me back into the embrasure of the window, where we stood in plain sight but with our faces blotted out against the light.  Mayenne looked up from two rings he was comparing, one in each hand.  Lucas, hat on head, came rapidly across the room.

“So you have appeared again,” Mayenne said.  “I could almost believe myself back in night before last.”

“Aye; at last I have.”  Lucas was all hot and ruffled, panting half from hurry, half from wrath.

“You saw fit to be absent last night,” Mayenne went on indifferently, his eyes on the ring.  “I trust, for your sake, you have used your time profitably.”

“I have been about my own concerns,” Lucas answered lightly, arming himself with his insolence against the other’s disdain.  In a moment he had mastered the excitement that brought him so stormily into the room.  He was once more the Lucas who had entered that other night, nonchalant, mocking.

“Pretty trinkets,” he observed, sitting down and lifting a bracelet from the tray.

The close kinship of these men betrayed itself in nothing so sharply as in their unerring instinct for annoying each other.  Had Lucas volunteered explanation for his absence, Mayenne would not have listened to it; but as he withheld it, the duke demanded brusquely: 

“Well, do you give an account of yourself?  You had better.”

Lucas repeated the tactics which he had found such good entertainment before.  He looked with raised eyebrows toward us.

“You would not have me speak before these vermin, uncle?”

“These vermin understand no French,” Mayenne made answer.  “But do as it likes you.  It is nothing to me.”

My master pinched my hand.  Mayenne did not know us!  After all, he was what M. Etienne had called him—­a man, neither god nor devil.  He could make mistakes like the rest of us.  For once he had been caught napping.

Lucas leaned back in his chair with a meditative air, as if idly wondering whether to speak or not.  In his place I should not have wondered one moment.  Had Mayenne assured me in that quiet tone that he cared nothing whether I spoke, I should scarce have been able to utter my words fast enough.  But there was so strange a twist in Lucas’s nature that he must sometimes thwart his own interests, value his caprice above his prosperity.  Also, in this case his story was no triumphant one.  But at length he did begin it: 

“I went to Belin to inform him that day before yesterday Etienne de Mar murdered his lackey, Pontou, in Mar’s house in the Rue Coupejarrets.”

“Was that your errand?” Mayenne said, looking up in slow surprise.  “My faith! your oaths to Lorance trouble you little.”

Lucas started forward sharply.  “Do you tell me you did not know my purpose?”

“I knew, of course, that you were up to some warlockry,” Mayenne answered; “I did not concern myself to discover what.”