“Vigo, M. le Comte is arrested!  He’s in the Bastille!”

Vigo grasped my arm, and lifted rather than led me in at the guard-room door, slamming it in the soldiers’ faces.

“Now, Felix.”

“M.  Etienne!” I gasped—­“M.  Etienne is arrested!  They were lying in wait for him at the back of the house, by the tower.  They’ve taken him off in a coach to the Bastille.”

“Who have?”

“The governor’s guard.  You’ll saddle and pursue?  You’ll rescue him?”

“How long ago?”

“About ten minutes.  The coach was standing in the Rue de l’Eveque.  They left a man guarding me, but I broke away.”

“It can’t be done,” Vigo said.  “They’ll be out of the quarter by now.  If I could catch them at all, it would be close by the Bastille.  No good in that; no use fighting four regiments.  What the devil are they arresting him for, Felix?  I understand Mayenne wants his blood, but what has the city guard to do with it?”

“It’s Lucas’s game,” I said.  Then I remembered that we had not confided to him the tale of the first arrest.  I went on to tell of the adventure of the Trois Lanternes, and, reflecting that he might better know just how the land lay with us, I made a clean breast of everything—­the fight before Ferou’s house, the rescue, the rencounter in the tunnel, to-day’s excursion, and all that befell in the council-room.  I wound up with a second full account of our capture under the very walls of the house, our garroting before we could cry on the guards to save us.  Vigo said nothing for some time; at length he delivered himself: 

“Monsieur wouldn’t have a patrol about the house.  He wouldn’t publish to the mob that he feared any danger whatever.  Of course no one foresaw this.  However, the arrest is the best thing could have happened.”

“Vigo!” I gasped in horror.  Was Vigo turned traitor?  The solid earth reeled beneath my feet.

“He’d never rest till he got himself killed,” Vigo went on.  “Monsieur’s hot enough, but M. Etienne’s mad to bind.  If they hadn’t caught him to-night he’d have been in some worse pickle to-morrow; while, as it is, he’s safe from swords at least.”

“But they can murder as well in the Bastille as elsewhere!” I cried.

Vigo shook his head.

“No; had they meant murder, they’d have settled him here in the alley.  Since they lugged him off unhurt, they don’t mean it.  I know not what the devil they are up to, but it isn’t that.”

“It was Lucas’s game in the first place,” I repeated.  “He’s too prudent to come out in the open and fight M. Etienne.  He never strikes with his own hand; his way is to make some one else strike for him.  So he gets M. Etienne into the Bastille.  That’s the first step.  I suppose he thinks Mayenne will attend to the second.”

“Mayenne dares not take the boy’s life,” Vigo answered.  “He could have killed him, an he chose, in the streets, and nobody the wiser.  But now that monsieur’s taken publicly to the Bastille, Mayenne dares not kill him there, by foul play or by law—­the Duke of St. Quentin’s son.  No; all Mayenne can do is to confine him at his good pleasure.  Whence presently we will pluck him out at King Henry’s good pleasure.”