“Aye.  That was before I knew.”

Thinking of the trust I had given him, my wrath boiled up again.  Monsieur took me by the shoulder and looked at me as if he would look through me to the naked soul.

“How do I know that you are not lying?”

“Monsieur does know it.”

“Yes,” he answered after a moment.  “Alas! yes, I know it.”

He stood looking at me, with the dreariest face I ever saw—­the face of a man whose son has sought to murder him.  Looking back on it now, I wonder that I ever went to Monsieur with that story.  I wonder why I did not bury the shame and disgrace of it in my own heart, at whatever cost keep it from Monsieur.  But the thought never entered my head then.  I was so full of black rage against Yeux-gris—­him most of all, because he had won me so—­that I could feel nothing else.  I knew that I pitied Monsieur, yet I hardly felt it.

“Tell me everything—­how you met them—­all.  Else I shall not believe a word of your devilish rigmarole,” Monsieur cried out.

I told him the whole shameful story, every word, from my lightning vision to my gossip with Marcel in the antechamber, he listening in hopeless silence.  At length I finished.  It seemed hours since he had spoken.  At last he said, “Then it is true.”  The grayness of his face drew the cry from me: 

“The villain! the black-hearted villain!”

“Take care, Felix, he is my son!”

I got hold of my cross and tore it off, breaking the chain.

“See, Monsieur.  That is the cross on which he swore the plot was not against you.  He swore it, and Gervais de Grammont laughed!  I swore, too, never to betray them!  Two perjuries!”

I flung the cross on the floor and stamped on it, splintering it.

“Profaner!” cried Monsieur.

“It is no sacrilege!” I retorted.  “That is no holy thing since he has touched it.  He has made it vile—­scoundrel, assassin, parricide!”

Monsieur struck the words from my lips.

“It is true,” I muttered.

“Were it ten times true, you have no right to say it.”

“No, I have none,” I answered, shamed.  I might not speak ill of a St. Quentin, though he were the devil’s own.  But my rage came uppermost again.

“I can bring Monsieur to the house in twenty minutes.  Vigo and a handful of men can take them prisoners before they suspect aught amiss.  They are only three—­he and Grammont and the lackey.”

But Monsieur shook his head.

“I cannot do that.”

“Why not, Monsieur?”

“Can I take my own son prisoner?”

“Monsieur need not go,” said I, wondering.  In his place I would have gone and killed Yeux-gris with my own hands.  “Vigo and I and two more can do it.  Vigo and I alone, if Monsieur would not shame him before the men.”  I guessed at what he was thinking.

“Not even you and Vigo,” he answered.  “Think you I would arrest my son like a common felon—­shame him like that?”