Then La Meffraye approached the maids and would have touched the dress of the little Margaret, as if to order it more daintily for the pleasing of her master’s eye.  But Maud Lindesay thrust her aside like an unclean thing.

Whereat La Meffraye laughed till her rusty black cloak quivered and rustled from hood to hem.

“Ah, my proud lady,” she croaked, “in a little, in a very little, you too will be calling upon La Meffraye to save you, to pity you.  But I, La Meffraye, will gloat over each drop of blood that distils from your fair neck.  Aha, you shall change your tone when at the white throat-apple which your sweetheart would have loved to kiss, you feel the bite of the sharp slow knife.  Then you will not thrust aside La Meffraye.  Then you shall cry and none shall pity.  Then she will spurn you from her knees.”

“Out!” said Gilles de Retz, briefly, and like some inferior imping devilkin before the great Master of Evil, La Meffraye retreated hobbling to the doorway of the marshal’s chamber, where she crouched nodding and chuckling, mumbling inaudible words, and mingling them ever with her dry cackling laughter.

Gilles de Retz stopped at the corner of the platform and looked long at Maud and Margaret where they stood on the great central square of marble.  It was the Maid who spoke first.

“Dear Messire,” she said sweetly and almost confidently, “you have a little girl of your own.  I know, for I have played with her.  I love her.  Therefore you will not hurt us.  I am sure you will not hurt us.  You are going to send us back in a ship to our own country, because it is lonely here where Maud and I know no one!”

The marshal smiled upon her his inhuman inscrutable smile.  He leaned against a pillar of strangely twisted design, and contemplated the two victims at his ease.

“Life is sweet to you, is it not?” he said at last; “you are truly happy, being young, and so have no need to be made young again.”

“Oh, but I am very old,” cried the Maid, gaining some confidence from the quiet of his voice, “I am nearly eight years old.  And our Maudie here, she is—­oh, a dreadful age!  She is very, very old!”

“You would not like to die?” suggested Gilles de Retz, with a certain soft insinuation.

“Oh, no,” said Margaret Douglas, “I am going to live long and long—­till every one in the world loves me.  I am going to help every one to get what he most desires.  And you know I can, for I shall be very rich.  And if what they say is true, and I am Princess of Galloway, I shall marry and be a very great lady.  But I shall never marry any one who is not a Douglas.”

The marshal nodded.

“I do not think that you shall marry any one who is not a Douglas!” he said, with a certain grave and not discourteous irony in his tones.