agine, thank Heaven for it, these secrets, or a hundredth part of the
treachery and cruelty and greed that lurked at my feet, ready to burst
all bounds at a pistol-shot. It had no significance for me that the
past day was the 23rd of August, or that the morrow was St.
Bartholomew's feast!

No. Yet mingled with the jubilation which the possibility of triumph
over our enemy raised in my breast, there was certainly a foreboding.
The Vidame's hints, no less than his open boasts, had pointed to
something to happen before morning--something wider than the mere
murder of a single man. The warning also which the Baron de Rosny had
given us at the inn occurred to me with new meaning. And I could not
shake the feeling off. I fancied, as I sat in the darkness astride of
my beam, that I could see, closing the narrow vista of the street, the
heavy mass of the Louvre; and that the murmur of voices and the tramp
of men assembling came from its courts, with now and again the stealthy
challenge of a sentry, the restrained voice of an officer. Scarcely a
wayfarer passed beneath me: so few, indeed, that I had no fear of
being detected from below. And yet unless I was mistaken, a furtive
step, a subdued whisper were borne to me on every breeze, from every
quarter. And the night was full of phantoms.

Perhaps all this was mere nervousness, the outcome of my position. At
any rate I felt no more of it when Croisette joined me. We had our
daggers, and that gave me some comfort. If we could once gain entrance
to the house opposite, we had only to beg, or in the last resort force
our way downstairs and out, and then to hasten with what speed we might
to Pavannes' dwelling. Clearly it was a question of time only now;
whether Bezers' band or we should first reach it. And struck by this I
whispered Marie to be quick. He seemed to be long in coming.

He scrambled down hand over hand at last, and then I saw that he had
not lingered above for nothing. He had contrived after getting out of
the window to let down the shutter. And more he had at some risk
lengthened our rope, and made a double line of it, so that it ran round
a hinge of the shutter; and when he stood beside us, he took it by one
end and disengaged it. Good, clever Marie!

"Bravo!" I said softly, clapping him on the back. "Now they will not
know which way the birds have flown!"

So there we all were, one of us, I confess, trembling. We slid easily
enough along the