As Captain d’Aubran and his troop were speeding westwards from Grenoble, Monsieur de Garnache, ever attended by his man, rode briskly in the opposite direction, towards the grey towers of Condillac, that reared themselves towards the greyer sky above the valley of the Isere. It was a chill, dull, autumnal day, with a raw wind blowing from the Alps; its breath was damp, and foretold of the rain that was likely to come anon, the rain with which the clouds hanging low about the distant hills were pregnant.

But Monsieur de Garnache was totally insensible to his surroundings; his mind was very busy with the interview from which he had come, and the interview to which he was speeding. Once he permitted himself a digression, that he might point a moral for the benefit of his servant.

“You see, Rebecque, what a plague it is to have to do with women. Are you sufficiently grateful to me for having quelled your matrimonial ardour of two months ago? No, you are not. Grateful you may be; sufficiently grateful, never; it would be impossible. No gratitude could be commensurate with the benefit I conferred upon you. Yet if you had married, and discovered for yourself the troubles that come from too close an association with that sex which some wag of old ironically called the weaker, and of which contemporary fools with no sense of irony continue so to speak in good faith, you could have blamed only yourself. You would have shrugged your shoulders and made the best of it, realizing that no other man had put this wrong upon you. But with me—thousand devils!—it is very different. I am a man who, in one particular at least, has chosen his way of life with care; I have seen to it that I should walk a road unencumbered by any petticoat. What happens? What comes of all my careful plans?

“Fate sends an infernal cut-throat to murder our good king—whose soul God rest eternally! And since his son is of an age too tender to wield the sceptre, the boy’s mother does it in his name. Thus, I, a soldier, being subject to the head of the State, find myself, by no devising of my own, subject to a woman.

“In itself that is bad enough. Too bad, indeed—Ventregris!—too bad. Yet Fate is not content. It must occur to this woman to select me—me of all men—to journey into Dauphiny, and release another woman from the clutches of yet a third. And to what shifts are we not put, to what discomforts not subjected? You know them, Rabecque, for you have shared them with me. But it begins to break upon my mind that what we have endured may be as nothing to what may lie before us. It is an ill thing to have to do with women. Yet you, Rabecque, would have deserted me for one of them!”

Rabecque was silent. Maybe he was ashamed of himself; or maybe that, not agreeing with his master, he had yet sufficient appreciation of his position to be discreetly silent where his opinions might be at variance. Thus Garnache was encouraged to continue.

“And what is all this trouble about, which they have sent me to set right? About a marriage. There is a girl wants to marry one man, and a woman who wants to marry her to another. Ponder the possibilities of tragedy in such a situation. Half this world’s upheavals have had their source in less. Yet you, Rabecque, would have married!”

Necessity at last turned his discourse to other matters.

“Tell me, now,” said he abruptly, in a different tone, “is there hereabouts a ford?”

“There is a bridge up yonder, monsieur,” returned the servant, thankful to have the conversation changed.

They rode towards it in silence, Garnache’s eyes set now upon the grey pile that crowned the hillock, a half-mile away, on the opposite bank of the stream. They crossed the bridge and rode up the gently rising, bare, and rugged ground towards Condillac. The place wore an entirely peaceful air, strong and massive though it appeared. It was encircled by a ditch, but the drawbridge was down, and the rust on its chains argued that long had it been so.

None coming to challenge them, the pair rode across the planks, and the dull thud of their hooves started into activity some one in the gatehouse.

A fellow rudely clad—a hybrid between man-at-arms and lackey—lounged on a musket to confront them in the gateway. Monsieur de Garnache announced his name, adding that he came to crave an audience of Madame la Marquise, and the man stood aside to admit him. Thus he and Rabecque rode forward into the roughly paved courtyard.

From several doorways other men emerged, some of martial bearing, showing that the place was garrisoned to some extent. Garnache took little heed of them. He flung his reins to the man whom he had first addressed—the fellow had kept pace beside him—and leapt nimbly to the ground, bidding Rabecque await him there.

The soldier lackey resigned the reins to Rabecque, and requested Monsieur de Garnache to follow him. He led the way through a door on the left, down a passage and across an anteroom, and ushered the visitor finally into a spacious, gloomy hall, panelled in black oak and lighted as much by the piled-up fire that flared on the noble hearth as by the grey daylight that filtered through the tall mullioned windows.

As they entered, a liver-coloured hound that lay stretched before the fire growled lazily, and showed the whites of his eyes. Paying little attention to the dog, Garnache looked about him. The apartment was handsome beyond praise, in a sombre, noble fashion. It was hung with pictures of departed Condillacs—some of them rudely wrought enough—with trophies of ancient armour, and with implements of the chase. In the centre stood an oblong table of black oak, very richly carved about its massive legs, and in a china bowl, on this, an armful of late roses filled the room with their sweet fragrance.

Then Garnache espied a page on the window-seat, industriously burnishing a cuirass. He pursued his task, indifferent to the newcomer’s advent, until the knave who had conducted thither the Parisian called the boy and bade him go tell the Marquise that a Monsieur de Garnache, with a message from the Queen-Regent, begged an audience.

The boy rose, and simultaneously, out of a great chair by the hearth, whose tall back had hitherto concealed him, there rose another figure. This was a stripling of some twenty summers—twenty-one, in fact—of a pale, beautifully featured face, black hair and fine black eyes, and very sumptuously clad in a suit of shimmering silk whose colour shifted from green to purple as he moved.

Monsieur de Garnache assumed that he was in the presence of Marius de Condillac. He bowed a trifle stiffly, and was surprised to have his bow returned with a graciousness that amounted almost to cordiality.

“You are from Paris, monsieur?” said the young man, in a gentle, pleasant voice. “I fear you have had indifferent weather for your journey.”

Garnache thought of other things besides the weather that he had found indifferent, and he felt warmed almost to the point of anger at the very recollection. But he bowed again, and answered amiably enough.

The young man offered him a seat, assuring him that his mother would not keep him waiting long. The page had already gone upon his errand.

Garnache took the proffered chair, and sank down with creak and jingle to warm himself at the fire.

“From what you have said, I gather that you are Monsieur Marius de Condillac,” said he. “I, as you may have heard me announced by your servant, am Martin Marie Rigobert de Garnache—at your service.”

“We have heard of you, Monsieur de Garnache,” said the youth as he crossed his shapely legs of silken violet, and fingered the great pearl that depended from his ear. “But we had thought that by now you would be on your way to Paris.”

“No doubt—with Margot,” was the grim rejoinder.

But Marius either gathered no suggestion from its grimness, or did not know the name Garnache uttered, for he continued:

“We understood that you were to escort Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye to Paris, to place her under the tutelage of the Queen-Regent. I will not conceal from you that we were chagrined at the reflection cast upon Condillac; nevertheless, Her Majesty’s word is law in Dauphiny as much as it is in Paris.”

“Quite as much, and I am relieved to hear you confess it,” said Garnache drily, and he scanned more closely the face of this young man. He found cause to modify the excellent impression he had received at first. Marius’s eyebrows were finely pencilled, but they arched a shade too much, and his eyes were set a trifle too closely; the mouth, which had seemed beautiful at first, looked, in addition, on this closer inspection, weak, sensual, and cruel.

There fell upon the momentary silence the sound of an opening door, and both men rose simultaneously to their feet.

In the splendid woman that entered, Monsieur de Garnache saw a wonderful likeness to the boy who stood beside him. She received the emissary very graciously. Marius set a chair for her between the two they had been occupying, and thus interchanging phrases of agreeable greeting the three sat down about the hearth with every show of the greatest amity.

A younger man might have been put out of countenance; the woman’s surpassing beauty, her charm of manner, her melodious voice, falling on the ear soft and gentle as a caress, might have turned a man of less firmness a little from his purpose, a little perhaps from his loyalty and the duty that had brought him all the way from Paris. But Monsieur de Garnache was to her thousand graces as insensible as a man of stone. And he came to business briskly. He had no mind to spend the day at her fireside in pleasant, meaningless talk.

“Madame,” said he, “monsieur your son informs me that you have heard of me and of the business that brings me into Dauphiny. I had not looked for the honour of journeying quite so far as Condillac; but since Monsieur de Tressan, whom I made my ambassador, appears to have failed so signally, I am constrained to inflict my presence upon you.”

“Inflict?” quoth she, with a pretty look of make-believe dismay. “How harsh a word, monsieur!”

The smoothness of the implied compliment annoyed him.

“I will use any word you think more adequate, madame, if you will suggest it,” he answered tartly.

“There are a dozen I might suggest that would better fit the case—and with more justice to yourself,” she answered, with a smile that revealed a gleam of white teeth behind her scarlet lips. “Marcus, bid Benoit bring wine. Monsieur de Garnache will no doubt be thirsting after his ride.”

Garnache said nothing. Acknowledge the courtesy he would not; refuse it he could not. So he sat, and waited for her to speak, his eyes upon the fire.

Madame had already set herself a course. Keener witted than her son, she had readily understood, upon Garnache’s being announced to her, that his visit meant the failure of the imposture by which she had sought to be rid of him.

“I think, monsieur,” she said presently, watching him from under her lids, “that we have, all of us who are concerned in Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye’s affairs, been at cross-purposes. She is an impetuous, impulsive child, and it happened that some little time ago we had words—such things will happen in the most united families. Whilst the heat of her foolish anger was upon her, she wrote a letter to the Queen, in which she desired to be removed from my tutelage. Since then, monsieur, she has come to repent her of it. You, who no doubt understand a woman’s mind—”

“Set out upon no such presumption, madame,” he interrupted. “I know as little of a woman’s mind as any man who thinks he knows a deal—and that is nothing.”

She laughed as at an excellent jest, and Marius, overhearing Garnache’s retort as he was returning to resume his seat, joined in her laugh.

“Paris is a fine whetstone for a man’s wits,” said he.

Garnache shrugged his shoulders.

“I take it, madame, that you wish me to understand that Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye, repenting of her letter, desires no longer to repair to Paris; desires, in fact, to remain here at Condillac in your excellent care.”

“You apprehend the position exactly, monsieur.”

“To my mind,” said he, “it presents few features difficult of apprehension.”

Marius’s eyes flashed his mother a look of relief; but the Marquise, who had an ear more finely trained, caught the vibration of a second meaning in the emissary’s words.

“All being as you say, madame,” he continued, “will you tell me why, instead of some message to this purport, you sent Monsieur de Tressan back to me with a girl taken from some kitchen or barnyard, whom it was sought to pass off upon me as Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye?”

The Marquise laughed, and her son, who had shown signs of perturbation, taking his cue from her, laughed too.

“It was a jest, monsieur”—she told him, miserably conscious that the explanation could sound no lamer.

“My compliments, madame, upon the humour that prevails in Dauphiny. But your jest failed of its purpose. It did not amuse me, nor, so far as I could discern, was Monsieur de Tressan greatly taken with it. But all this is of little moment, madame,” he continued. “Since you tell me that Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye is content to remain here, I am satisfied that it is so.”

They were the very words that she desired to hear from him; yet his manner of uttering them gave her little reassurance. The smile on her lips was forced; her watchful eyes smiled not at all.

“Still,” he continued, “you will be so good as to remember that I am not my own master in this affair. Were that so, I should not fail to relieve you at once of my unbidden presence.”

“Oh, monsieur—”

“But, being the Queen’s emissary, I have her orders to obey, and those orders are to convey Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye to Paris. They make no allowance for any change that may have occurred in mademoiselle’s inclinations. If the journey is now distasteful to her, she has but her own rashness to blame in having sought it herself. What imports is that she is bidden by the Queen to repair to Paris; as a loyal subject she must obey the Queen’s commands; you, as a loyal subject, must see to it that she obeys them. So, madame, I count upon your influence with mademoiselle to see that she is ready to set out by noon to-morrow. One day already has been wasted me by your—ah—jest, madame. The Queen likes her ambassadors to be brisk.”

The Dowager reclined in her chair, and bit her lip. This man was too keen for her. She had no illusions. He had seen through her as if she had been made of glass; he had penetrated her artifices and detected her falsehoods. Yet feigning to believe her and them, he had first neutralized her only weapons—other than offensive—then used them for her own defeat. Marius it was who took up the conversation.

“Monsieur,” he cried—and there was a frown drawing together his fine brows—“what you suggest amounts to a tyranny on the Queen’s part.”

Garnache was on his feet, his chair grating the polished floor.

“Monsieur says?” quoth he, his glittering eye challenging the rash boy to repeat his words.

But the Dowager intervened with a little trill of laughter.

“Bon Dieu! Marius, what are you saying? Foolish boy! And you, Monsieur de Garnache, do not heed him, I beg you. We are so far from Court in this little corner of Dauphiny, and my son has been reared in so free an atmosphere that he is sometimes betrayed into expressions whose impropriety he does not realize.”

Garnache bowed in token of his perfect satisfaction, and at that moment two servants entered bearing flagons and beakers, fruits and sweetmeats, which they placed upon the table. The Dowager rose, and went to do the honours of the board. The servants withdrew.

“You will taste our wine of Condillac, monsieur?”

He acquiesced, expressing thanks, and watched her fill a beaker for him, one for herself, and another for her son. She brought him the cup in her hands. He took it with a grave inclination of the head. Then she proffered him the sweetmeats. To take one, he set down the cup on the table, by which he had also come to stand. His left hand was gloved and held his beaver and whip.

She nibbled, herself, at one of the comfits, and he followed her example. The boy, a trifle sullen since the last words, stood on the hearth with his back to the fire, his hands clasped behind him.

“Monsieur,” she said, “do you think it would enable you to comply with what I have signified to be not only our own wishes, but those of Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye herself, if she were to state them to you?”

He looked up sharply, his lips parting in a smile that revealed his strong white teeth.

“Are you proposing another of your jests, madame?”

She laughed outright. A wonderful assurance was hers, thought Monsieur de Garnache. “Mon Dieu! no, monsieur,” she cried. “If you will, you may see the lady herself.”

He took a turn in the apartment, idly, as does a man in thought.

“Very well,” said he, at last. “I do not say that it will alter my determination. But perhaps—yes, I should be glad of an opportunity of the honour of making Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye’s acquaintance. But no impersonations, I beg, madame!” He said it half-laughingly, taking his cue from her.

“You need have no fear of any.”

She walked to the door, opened it, and called “Gaston!” In answer came the page whom Garnache had found in the room when he was admitted.

“Desire Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye to come to us here at once,” she bade the boy, and closed the door.

Garnache had been all eyes for some furtive sign, some whispered word; but he had surprised neither.

His pacing had brought him to the opposite end of the board, where stood the cup of wine madame had poured for Marius. His own, Garnache had left untouched. As if abstractedly, he now took up the beaker, pledged madame with his glance, and drank. She watched him, and suddenly a suspicion darted through her mind—a suspicion that he suspected them.

Dieu! What a man was this! He took no chances. Madame reflected that this augured ill for the success of the last resource upon which, should all else fail, she was counting to keep mademoiselle at Condillac. It seemed incredible that one so wary and watchful should have committed the rashness of venturing alone into Condillac without taking his precautions to ensure his ability to retreat.

In her heart she felt daunted by him. But in the matter of that wine—the faintest of smiles hovered on her lips, her eyebrows went up a shade. Then she took up the cup that had been poured for the Parisian, and bore it to her son.

“Marius, you are not drinking,” said she. And seeing a command in her eyes; he took the beaker from her hand and bore it to his lips, emptying the half of it, whilst with the faintest smile of scorn the Dowager swept Garnache a glance of protest, as of one repudiating an unworthy challenge.

Then the door opened, and the eyes of all three were centred upon the girl that entered.