“Well, then, pardieu, we’ll try if he means it!”

“He gave me to understand that he meant it.  The St. Quentins out of the way, there is Valere, stout Kingsman, to succeed.  The king loses little.”

“Then are you gone mad that you put yourself in my grasp?”

“I was never saner.  I come, my friend, to make you listen to sanity.”

I had waited from moment to moment Mayenne’s summons to his soldiers.  But he had not rung, and now he flung himself down again in his arm-chair.

“What, to your understanding, is sanity?”

“If you send me to join my son, monsieur, you leave mademoiselle without a protector, friendless, penniless, in the midst of a hostile army cursing the name of Mayenne.  Have you reared her delicately, tenderly, for that?”

Mayenne sat silent, his face a mask.  It was impossible to tell whether the shot hit.  Monsieur went on: 

“You can of course hold us in durance, torture us, kill us; but you must answer for it to the people of Paris.”

Still was Mayenne silent, drumming on the edge of the table.  Finally he said roughly, as if the words were dragged from him against his will: 

“I shall not torture you.  I never meant to torture Mar.  The arrest was not my work.  Since it was done, I meant to profit by it to keep him awhile out of my way—­only that.  I threatened my cousin otherwise in heat of passion.  But I shall not torture him.  I shall not kill him.”

“Monsieur—­”

“I put a card in your hand,” Mayenne said curtly.  His pride ill brooked to concede the point, but he could not have it supposed that he did not see what he was doing.  “I give you a card.  Do what you can with it.”

“Monsieur, you show what little surprises me—­knightly generosity.  It is to that generosity I appeal.”

“Is the horse of that colour?  But now you were frightening my prudence.”

“Ah, but how fortunate the man to whom generosity and prudence point the same path!”

It may have been but pretence, this smiling bonhomie of Monsieur’s.  Mayenne doubtless gauged it as such, but, at any rate, he suffered it to warm him.  He regained of a sudden all the amiability with which he had greeted his guest.  Smiling and calm, he answered: 

“St. Quentin, I care little for either your threats or your cajoleries.  They amuse me alike, and move me not.  But I have a care for my sweet cousin.  Since you threaten me with her danger, you have the whiphand.”

Now it was Monsieur’s turn to sit discreetly silent, waiting.

“I went last night to tell the child I would not harm her lover.  Lo! she had flown.  I had a regiment searching Paris for her.  I was in the streets myself till dawn.”

“Monsieur, she made her way to us at St. Denis to offer herself to our torture did you torture Mar.”

“Morbleu!” Mayenne cried, half rising.

“God’s mercy, we’re not ruffians out there!  I tell it to show you to what the maid was strung.”