He stared at me as if he would read the answer in my face, but he found it as blank as the wall.  He flung away and made a turn down the room, and came back to seize me by the arm.

“How are we to do it, Felix?” he demanded.

But I could only shrug my shoulders and answer: 

“Sais pas.”

He paced the floor once more, and presently faced me again with the declaration: 

“Lucas shall have her only over my dead body.”

“He will only have her own dead body,” I said.

He turned away abruptly and stood at the window, looking out with unseeing eyes.  “Lorance—­Lorance,” he murmured to himself.  I think he did not know he spoke aloud.

“If I could get word to her—­” he went on presently.  “But I can’t send you again.  Should I write a letter—­But letters are mischievous.  They fall into the wrong hands, and then where are we?”

“Monsieur,” I suggested, “if I could get a letter into the hands of Pierre, that lackey who befriended me—­” But he shook his head.

“They know you about the place.  It were safer to despatch one of these inn-men—­if any had the sense to go rein in hand.  Hang me if I don’t think I’ll go myself!”

“Monsieur,” I said, “Lucas swore by all things sacred that he would never molest you more.  Therefore you will do well to keep out of his way.”

“My faith, Felix,” he laughed, “you take a black view of mankind.”

“Not of mankind, M. Etienne.  Only of Lucas.  Not of Monsieur, or you, or Vigo.”

“And of Mayenne?”

“I don’t make out Mayenne,” I answered.  “I thought he was the worst of the crew.  But he let me go.  He said he would, and he did.”

“Think you he meant to let you go from the first?”

“Who knows?” I said, shrugging.  “Lucas is always lying.  But Mayenne—­sometimes he lies and sometimes not.  He’s base, and then again he’s kind.  You can’t make out Mayenne.”

“He does not mean you shall,” M. Etienne returned.  “Yet the key is not buried.  He is made up, like all the rest of us, of good and bad.”

“Monsieur,” I said, “if there is any bad in the St. Quentins I, for one, do not know it.”

“Ah, Felix,” he cried, “you may believe that till doomsday—­you will—­of Monsieur.”

His face clouded a little, and he fell silent.  I knew that, besides his thoughts of his lady, came other thoughts of his father.  He sat gravely silent.  But of last night’s bitter distress he showed no trace.  Last night he had not been able to take his eyes from the miserable past; but to-day he saw the future.  A future not altogether flowery, perhaps, but one which, however it turned out, should not repeat the old mistakes and shames.

“Felix,” he said at length, “I see nothing for it but to eat my pride.”

I kept still in the happy hope that I should hear just what I longed to; he went on: 

“I swore then that I would never darken his doors again; I was mad with anger; so was he.  He said if I went with Gervais I went forever.”