oment askance;
and then, coming forward, accosted us. But I need not detail the
particulars of a conversation which was almost word for word the same
as that which had passed in the Rue de la Pourpointerie; suffice it
that he made the same request with the same frank audacity, and that,
granting it, we were in a moment following hint up a similar staircase.

"This way, messieurs, this way!" he said; as he had on that other
night, while we groped our way upwards in the dark. He opened a door,
and a light shone out; and we entered a room that seemed, with its bare
walls and rafters, its scanty stool and table and lamp, the very
counterpart of that other room. In one wall appeared the dingy
curtains of an alcove, closely drawn; and the shutter stood open,
until, at the child's request, expressed in the same words, I went to
it and closed it.

We were both so well muffled up and disguised, and the light of the
lamp shining upwards so completely distorted the features, that I had
no fear of recognition, unless the King's voice betrayed him. But when
he spoke, breaking the oppressive silence of the room, his tone was as
strange and hollow as I could wish.

"The shutter is closed," he said; "but the shutter of God's mercy is
never closed!"

Still, knowing that this was the crucial moment, and that we should be
detected now if at all, I found it; an age before the voice behind the
curtains answered "Amen!" and yet another age before the hidden
speaker continued "Who are you?"

"The cure of St. Germain," Henry responded.

The man behind the curtains gasped, and they were for a moment
violently agitated, as if a hand seized them and let them go again.
But I had reckoned that the unknown, after a pause of horror, would
suppose that he had heard amiss and continue his usual catechism. And
so it proved. In a voice that shook a little, he asked, "Whom do you
bring to me?"

"A sinner," the King answered.

"What has he done?"

"He will tell you."

"I am listening," the unknown said.

The light in the basin flared up a little, casting dark shadows on the
ceiling, and at the same moment the shutter, which I had failed to
fasten securely, fell open with a grinding sound. One of the curtains
swayed a little in the breeze, "I have robbed my master," I said,
slowly.

"Of how much?"

"A hundred and twenty thousand crowns."

The bed shook until the boards creaked under it; but this time no hand
grasped the curtains