the interview to which he was speeding. Once he permitted himself a
digression, that he might point a moral for the benefit of his servant.

"You see, Rebecque, what a plague it is to have to do with women. Are
you sufficiently grateful to me for having quelled your matrimonial
ardour of two months ago? No, you are not. Grateful you may be;
sufficiently grateful, never; it would be impossible. No gratitude could
be commensurate with the benefit I conferred upon you. Yet if you had
married, and discovered for yourself the troubles that come from too
close an association with that sex which some wag of old ironically
called the weaker, and of which contemporary fools with no sense of
irony continue so to speak in good faith, you could have blamed only
yourself. You would have shrugged your shoulders and made the best of
it, realizing that no other man had put this wrong upon you. But with
me--thousand devils!--it is very different. I am a man who, in one
particular at least, has chosen his way of life with care; I have seen
to it that I should walk a road unencumbered by any petticoat. What
happens? What comes of all my careful plans?

"Fate sends an infernal cut-throat to murder our good king--whose soul
God rest eternally! And since his son is of an age too tender to wield
the sceptre, the boy's mother does it in his name. Thus, I, a soldier,
being subject to the head of the State, find myself, by no devising of
my own, subject to a woman.

"In itself that is bad enough. Too bad, indeed--Ventregris!--too bad.
Yet Fate is not content. It must occur to this woman to select me--me
of all men--to journey into Dauphiny, and release another woman from
the clutches of yet a third. And to what shifts are we not put, to what
discomforts not subjected? You know them, Rabecque, for you have shared
them with me. But it begins to break upon my mind that what we have
endured may be as nothing to what may lie before us. It is an ill thing
to have to do with women. Yet you, Rabecque, would have deserted me for
one of them!"

Rabecque was silent. Maybe he was ashamed of himself; or maybe that,
not agreeing with his master, he had yet sufficient appreciation of
his position to be discreetly silent where his opinions might be at
variance. Thus Garnache was encouraged to continue.

"And what is all this trouble about, which they have sent me to set
right? About a marriage. There is a girl wants to marry one man, and
a woman who wants