r stay where you are, Madame, until morning! And risk Mirepoix!"

"Oh, no! no!" Madame cried vehemently.

"Oh, yes! yes!" he replied. "What do you say, Coadjutor? Do you not
think so?"

The priest looked down sullenly. His voice shook as he murmured in
answer, "Madame will please herself. She has a character, M. le
Vidame. But if she prefer to stay here--well!"

"Oh, she has a character, has she?" rejoined the giant, his eyes
twinkling with evil mirth, "and she should go home with you, and my old
friend Madame d'O, to save it! That is it, is it? No, no," he
continued when he had had his silent laugh out, "Madame de Pavannes
will do very well here--very well here until morning. We have work to
do. Come. Let us go and do it."

"Do you mean it?" said the priest, starting and looking up with a
subtle challenge--almost a threat--in his tone.

"Yes, I do."

Their eyes met: and seeing their looks, I chuckled, nudging Croisette.
No fear of their discovering us now. I recalled the old proverb which
says that when thieves fall out, honest men come by their own, and
speculated on the chance of the priest freeing us once for all from M.
de Bezers.

But the two were ill-matched. The Vidame could have taken up the other
with one hand and dashed his head on the floor. And it did not end
there. I doubt if in craft the priest was his equal. Behind a frank
brutality Bezers--unless his reputation belied him--concealed an
Italian intellect. Under a cynical recklessness he veiled a rare
cunning and a constant suspicion; enjoying in that respect a
combination of apparently opposite qualities, which I have known no
other man to possess in an equal degree, unless it might be his late
majesty, Henry the Great. A child would have suspected the priest; a
veteran might have been taken in by the Vidame.

And indeed the priest's eyes presently sank. "Our bargain is to go for
nothing?" he muttered sullenly.

"I know of no bargain," quoth the Vidame. "And I have no time to lose,
splitting hairs here. Set it down to what you like. Say it is a whim
of mine, a fad, a caprice. Only understand that Madame de Pavannes
stays. We go. And--" he added this, as a sudden thought seemed to
strike him, "though I would not willingly use compulsion to a lady, I
think Madame d'O had better come too."

"You speak masterfully," the priest said with a sneer, forgetting the
tone he had himself used a few minutes before to Mirepo