“No.”

“Then off with us both.  And, a bottle of the governor’s burgundy which I have been saving.”

“Wine?” excitedly.

“Does not the name sound good?  And, by the way, did you know that that woman with the grey mask, who was at the Corne d’Abondance . . .”

“I have seen her,” quietly.

“What is her name, and what has she done?” indifferently.

“Her name I can not tell you, Paul.”

“Can not?  Why not ’will not’?”

“Will not, then.  I have given my promise.”

“Have I ever kept a secret from you, Victor?”

“One.”

“Name it.”

“That mysterious mademoiselle whom you call Diane.  You have never even told me what she looks like.”

“I could not if I tried.  But this woman in the mask; at least you might tell me what she has done.”

“Politics.  Conspiracy, like misery, loves company. . . .  Who has been burning paper?” sniffing.

“Burning paper?”

“Yes; and here’s the ash.  You’ve been burning something?”

“Not I, lad,” with an abrupt laugh.  “Hang it, let us go and eat.”

“Yes; I am anxious to know why Monsieur le Marquis is here.”

“And the burgundy; it will be like old times.”  There was sweat on the Chevalier’s forehead, and he drew his sleeve across it.

From an obscure corner of the council chamber the figure of a man emerged.  He walked on tiptoe toward the table.  The black ash on the table fascinated him.  For several moments he stared at it.

“’I kiss your handsome grey eyes a thousand times’,” he said, softly.  He touched the ash with the tip of his finger, and the feathery particles sifted about, as if the living had imparted to the inanimate the sense of uneasiness.  “For a space I thought he would kiss her.  In faith, there is more to Monsieur du Cevennes than I had credited to his account.  It takes power, in the presence of that woman, to resist the temptation to kiss her.  But here’s a new element, a new page which makes interesting reading.”

The man twirled the ends of his mustache.

“What a curious game of chess life is!  Here’s a simple play made complicated.  How serenely I moved toward the coveted checkmate, to find a castle towering in the way!  I came in here to await young Montaigne.  He fails to appear.  Chance brings others here, and lo! it becomes a new game.  And D’Herouville will be out of hospital to-morrow or next day.  Quebec promises to become as lively as Paris.  Diane, he called her.  What is her object in concealing her name?  By all the gargoyles of Notre Dame, but she would lure a bishop from his fish of a Friday!”

He gathered up a pinch of the ash and blew it into the air.

“Happily the poet smelt nothing but paper.  Lockets and love-letters; and D’Herouville and I for cutting each other’s throats!  That is droll. . . .  My faith, I will do it!  It will be a tolerably good stroke.  ‘I kiss your handsome grey eyes a thousand times’!  Chevalier, Chevalier!  Dip steel into blood, and little comes of it; but dip steel into that black liquid named ink, and a kingdom topples.  She is to become a nun, too, she says.  I think not.”