Gilles de Retz looked up quickly, and, catching sight of the Lady Sybilla, with a sweep of his hand he thrust his manuscript into an open drawer of the escritoire.

“Ah, Sybilla,” he said, leaning back in his chair with an air of easy familiarity, “you are more sparing of your visits to me than of yore.  To what do I owe the pleasure and honour of this one?”

The girl eyed him long before answering.  She stood statue-still by the curtain at the entrance of the apartment, ignoring the chair which the marshal had offered her with a bow and a courteous wave of his hand.

“I have come,” she made answer at last, in the deep even tones which she had used before the council of the traitors at Stirling, “to demand from you, Messire Gilles de Retz, what you mean to do with the little Margaret Douglas and her companion, whom you wickedly kidnapped from their own country and have brought with you in your train to France?”

“I have satisfaction in informing you,” replied the marshal, suavely, “that it is my purpose to dispose of both these agreeable young ladies entirely according to my own pleasure.”

The girl caught at her breast with her hand, as if to stay a sudden spasm of pain.

“Not at Tiffauges—­” she gasped, “not at Champtoce?”

The marshal leaned back, enjoying her terror, as one tastes in slow sips a rare brand of wine.  He found the flavour of her fears delicious.

“No, Sybilla,” he replied at last, “neither at Champtoce nor yet at Tiffauges—­for the present, that is, unless some of your Scottish friends come over to rescue them out of my hands.”

“How, then, do you intend to dispose of them?” she urged.

“I shall send them to your puking sister and her child, hiding their heads and sewing their samplers at Machecoul.  What more can you ask?  Surely the young and fair are safe in such worthy society, even if they may chance to find it a little dull.”

“How can I believe him, or know that for once he will forego his purposes of hell?” Sybilla murmured, half to herself.

The Marshal de Retz smiled, if indeed the contraction of muscles which revealed a line of white teeth can be called by that name.  In the sense in which Astarte would have smiled upon a defenceless sheepfold, so Gilles de Retz might have been said to smile at his visitor.

“You may believe me, sweet Lady Sybilla,” said the marshal, “because there is one vice which it is needless for me to practise in your presence, that of uncandour.  I give you my word that unless your friends come worrying me from the land of Scots, the maids shall not die.  Perhaps it were better to warn any visitors that even at Machecoul we are accustomed to deal with such cases.  Is it not so, Astarte?”

At the sound of her name the huge wolf rose slowly, and, walking to her master’s knee, she nosed upon him like a favourite hound.

“And if your intent be not that which causes fear to haunt the precincts of your palaces like a night-devouring beast, and makes your name an execration throughout Brittany and the Vendee, why have you carried the little child and the other pretty fool forth from their country?  Was it not enough that you should slay the brothers?  Wherefore was it necessary utterly to cut off the race of the Douglases?”