his unanswered questions touching the end of that butchery
above-stairs. She told him what Fortunio had said that Garnache was
drowned as a consequence of his mad leap from the window.

Into Tressan's mind there sprang the memory of the thing Garnache had
promised should befall him in such a case. It drove the colour from his
cheeks and brought great lines of fearful care into sharp relief about
his mouth and eyes.

"Madame, we are ruined!" he groaned.

"Tressan," she answered him contemptuously, "you are chicken-hearted.
Listen to me. Did he not say that he had left his man behind him when he
came to Condillac? Where think you that he left his man?"

"Maybe in Grenoble," answered the Seneschal, staring.

"Find out," she told him impressively, her eyes on his, and calm as
though they had never looked upon such sights as that very night had
offered them. "If not in Grenoble, certainly, at least, somewhere in
this Dauphiny of which you are the King's Lord Seneschal. Turn the whole
province inside out, man, but find the fellow. Yours is the power to
do it. Do it, then, and you will have no consequences to fear. You have
seen the man?"

"Ay, I have seen him. I remember him; and his name, I bethink me, is
Rabecque."

He took courage; his face looked less dejected.

"You overlook nothing, madame," he murmured. "You are truly wonderful.
I will start the search this very night. My men are almost all at
Montelimar awaiting my commands. I'll dispatch a messenger with orders
that they are to spread themselves throughout Dauphiny upon this quest."

The door opened, and Fortunio entered. He was still unwashed and
terrible to look upon, all blood-bespattered. The sight of him drove a
shudder through Tressan. The Marquise grew solicitous.

"How is your wound, Fortunio?" was her first question.

He made a gesture that dismissed the matter.

"It is nothing. I am over full-blooded, and if I am scratched, I bleed,
without perceiving it, enough to drain another man."

"Here, drink, mon capitaine," she urged him, very friendly, filling
him a cup with her own hands. "And you, Marius?" she asked. "Are you
recovering strength?"

"I am well," answered Marius sullenly. His defeat that evening had
left him glum and morose. He felt that he had cut a sorry figure in the
affair, and his vanity was wounded. "I deplore I had so little share in
the fight," he muttered.

"The lustiest fight ever I or any man beheld," swore Fortunio. "D