“Aha, Master Sholto, you are the captain of the guard and a knight, forsooth, and I am but poor clerk Laurence—­as you have ofttimes reminded me.  But I will show you a shift worth two of watching outside the door of the marshal’s hotel for tidings of the maids.  I will go where the marshal goes, and see all he sees.  And then, when the time comes, why, I will rescue them single-handed and thereafter make up my mind which of them I shall marry, whether Sholto’s sweetheart or the Fair Maid of Galloway herself.”

Thus headlong Laurence communed with himself, not knowing what he said nor to what terrible adventure he was committing himself.

But Gilles de Sille of the house of the Marshal de Retz, being left to himself in the half darkness of the garret, took up the viol and sang a curious air like that with which the charmer wiles his snakes to him, and at the end of every verse, he also laughed low to himself.

CHAPTER XLV

THE BOASTING OF GILLES DE SILLE

But, as fate would have it, it was not in the Hotel de Pornic nor yet in the city of Paris that Laurence O’Halloran was destined to enter the service of the most mighty Marshal de Retz.

Not till three days after his converse with the prisoner did Laurence find an opportunity of escaping from the house in the street of the Ursulines.  Sholto and his father meantime kept their watch upon the mansion of the enemy, turn and turn about; but without discovering anything pertinent to their purpose, or giving Laurence a chance to get clear off with Gilles de Sille.  The Lord James had also frequently adventured forth, as he declared, in order to spy out the land, though it is somewhat sad to relate that this espionage conducted itself in regions which gave more opportunities for investigating the peculiar delights of Paris than of discovering the whereabouts of Maud Lindesay and his cousin, the Fair Maid of Galloway.

The head of Gilles de Sille was still swathed in bandages when, with an additional swaddling of disguise across his eyes, he and Laurence, that truant scion of the house of O’Halloran, stole out into the night.  A frosty chill had descended with the darkness, and a pale, dank mist from the marshes of the Seine made the pair shiver as arm in arm they ventured carefully forth.

Laurence was doing a foolish, even a wicked, thing in thus, without warning, deserting his companions.  But he was just at the age when it is the habit of youth to deceive themselves with the thought that a shred of good intent covers a world of heedless folly.

The fugitives found the Hotel de Pornic practically deserted.  They approached it cautiously from the back, lest they should run into the arms of any of the numerous enemies of its terrible lord, who, though not abhorred in Paris as in most other places which he favoured with his visits, had yet little love spent upon him even there.