plendid victory at Saumur to
urge his kinsman, the Duc de Bercy, to join the Royalists.

He had powerful arguments to lay before a nobleman the whole traditions
of whose house were of constant alliance with the Crown of France, whose
very duchy had been the gift of a French monarch. Detricand had not seen
the Duke since he was a lad at Versailles, and there would be much in
his favour, for of all the Vaufontaines the Duke had reason to dislike
him least, and some winning power in him had of late grown deep and
penetrating.

When the Duke entered upon him in the library, he was under the
immediate influence of a stimulating talk with Philip d'Avranche and the
chief officers of the duchy. With the memory of past feuds and hatreds
in his mind, and predisposed against any Vaufontaine, his greeting was
courteously disdainful, his manner preoccupied.

Remarking that he had but lately heard of monsieur le comte's return to
France, he hoped he had enjoyed his career in--was it then England or
America? But yes, he remembered, it began with an expedition to take the
Channel Isles from England, an insolent, a criminal business in time of
peace, fit only for boys or buccaneers. Had monsieur le comte then spent
all these years in the Channel Isles--a prisoner perhaps? No? Fastening
his eyes cynically on the symbol of the Royalist cause on Detricand's
breast, he asked to what he was indebted for the honour of this present
visit. Perhaps, he added drily, it was to inquire after his own health,
which, he was glad to assure monsieur le comte and all his cousins of
Vaufontaine, was never better.

The face was like a leather mask, telling nothing of the arid sarcasm in
the voice. The shoulders were shrunken, the temples fallen in, the neck
behind was pinched, and the eyes looked out like brown beads alive with
fire, and touched with the excitement of monomania. His last word had
a delicate savagery of irony, though, too, there could be heard in the
tone a defiance, arguing apprehension, not lost upon his visitor.

Detricand had inwardly smiled during the old man's monologue, broken
only by courteous, half-articulate interjections on his own part. He
knew too well the old feud between their houses, the ambition that had
possessed many a Vaufontaine to inherit the dukedom of Bercy, and the
Duke's futile revolt against that possibility. But for himself, now heir
to the principality of Vaufontaine, and therefrom, by reversion, to that
of