ching out
how best to use this new tool for the cementing closer that fabric of
France which was his pride and glory. France was at once the mother
who gave his genius form and the son of his jealous love. And as he
listened, planning, sufficient strength crept back to the worn body.
He could play out his part to the end, and La Mothe would carry with
him no sense of his master's frailty to paralyze action. In loyalty
for loyalty's sake Louis had no faith.

"You need say no more," he said, nodding his head with sympathetic
interest. "A debt--a debt indeed. And to-morrow you begin your
repayment. To-morrow you go to Amboise with Monsieur de Commines.
Amboise," he repeated slowly, "Amboise," and paused. "Where His
Highness, the Dauphin----"

"Where my son waits--and watches." The thin hand crept up to the sunk
lips, lingered there an instant, crept up to the dull eyes, passed
across them once or twice with a motion eloquent of weary hopelessness,
and fell drearily to the lap. "God keep us in His mercy," said the
King, and as his finger-tips made the four points of the cross upon his
breast La Mothe felt he was upon holy ground. "God keep us in His
comfort. All is not well at Amboise, but my friend Philip knows--knows
and feels for me. I have no orders to give. All is left to him. Only
I say this, and never forget it, never--France comes first and
obedience is the payment of your debt."

CHAPTER VI

HOW LOUIS LOVED HIS SON

La Mothe sat silent. His fear had passed away utterly, but in its
place his awe had grown, an awe full of a deep pity. Youth is the true
age of intolerance and for the simple reason that it is the age of
ignorance. In its abundant strength, its sense of growth and
development, its vigorous, unfailing elasticity, its blessed want of
knowledge of the ills of life, its blindness to the inevitable coming
of these ills, it is impatient of a caution it calls cowardice, or a
frailty it neither understands in another nor anticipates for itself.
But in the rare instances when it takes thought its sympathies are more
generous than those of age, because the sorrows it sees are so much
greater than any it has known, ever realized in itself or even
conceived. So was it now with La Mothe. The pathetic, solitary
figure, feeble almost to helplessness, diseased, shrunken, dying,
Commines had said, yet with a heart warm in friendliness and a thought
for France alone, thrilled him to the ve