hat treachery might be intended
him, at least before ladies, he had thought to leave his sword behind,
but a second reflection prompted him to take it with him. It was true
no attack was likely to be made while he sat at meat with the woman
whose hospitality he was receiving, but a sword, he reflected, was
part of a soldier's dress and therefore not out of place, and--it was,
perhaps, not safe to leave it behind!

Having decided thus and the servitor not being yet returned, he made a
slight inspection of his room, as became one who was in a stranger's
house, and that stranger a person whose friendliness toward him
might--if he knew as much as he suspected of his history--be doubtful.
The room itself was a fairly large one, hung with tapestry
representing, as he supposed, scenes from the ancient romancists, and
lit by a window let into the upper part of the wall, so high up that
no one could see out of it except by standing on the table. Of doors
he could perceive no other but the one by which he had entered; nor on
the floor, which was of polished wood or _parquet_, was there any sign
that entrance could be made thereby--such entrance being a not
uncommon thing in ancient houses of the type of this manoir. On the
walls, let in between the tapestry and either lightly fastened to the
panelling or painted thereon, were two full-length pictures--one of a
man in full armour with his visor up and showing a stern, heavily
mustached face; the other of a young woman in antique costume.

Satisfied by this inspection--made as best might be by the feeble rays
of the lamp which the old man had left behind for his use--St. Georges
sat down upon the chair by the bed and waited for the servitor to come
and escort him to his hostess, and meditated--a little anxiously,
perhaps--on what his interview with her and her daughter might bring
forth.

"Is she, I wonder," he thought, "the she-wolf I have pictured her to
myself as being? Does she know, for truth, who and what I am--who and
what I believe myself to be? She may! It may indeed be so. If all
reports are true that I have been able to gather and piece together in
my remote life, far away from Paris and the world, she loved De Vannes
once--was his affianced wife. What may she not therefore have known of
his past? May know that I stand between this son of her husband and
his desire, his succession; may stand, indeed, between her and the
enjoyment for her lifetime of what her husband w