ked myself what honour was, and what good it could do me when
I lay rotting and forgotten; if I were not a fool following a Jack o'
Lanthorn; and whether, of all the men in the world, the relentless man
to whom I was returning would not be the first to gibe at my folly?

However, shame kept me straight; shame and the memory of Mademoiselle's
looks and words. I dared not be false to her again; I could not, after
speaking so loftily, fall so low, And therefore--though not without many
a secret struggle and quaking--I came, on the last evening but one of
November, to the Orleans gate, and rode slowly and sadly through the
streets by the Luxembourg on my way to the Pont au Change.

The struggle had sapped my last strength, however; and with the first
whiff of the gutters, the first rush of barefooted gamins under my
horse's hoofs, the first babel of street cries--the first breath, in a
word, of Paris--there came a new temptation; to go for one last night to
Zaton's, to see the tables again and the faces of surprise, to be for an
hour or two the old Berault. That would be no breach of honour, for in
any case I could not reach the Cardinal before to-morrow. And it could
do no harm. It could make no change in anything. It would not have been
a thing worth struggling about, indeed; only--only I had in my inmost
heart a suspicion that the stoutest resolutions might lose their force
in that atmosphere; and that there even such a talisman as the memory of
a woman's looks and words might lose its virtue.

Still, I think that I should have succumbed in the end if I had not
received at the corner of the Luxembourg a shock which sobered me
effectually. As I passed the gates, a coach, followed by two outriders,
swept out of the Palace courtyard; it was going at a great pace, and
I reined my jaded horse on one side to give it room. By chance as it
whirled by me, one of the leather curtains flapped back, and I saw for a
second by the waning light--the nearer wheels were no more than two feet
from my boot--a face inside.

A face and no more, and that only for a second. But it froze me. It was
Richelieu's, the Cardinal's; but not as I had been wont to see it--keen,
cold, acute, with intellect and indomitable will in every feature. This
face was contorted with the rage of impatience, was grim with the fever
of haste, and the fear of death. The eyes burned under the pale brow,
the moustache bristled, the teeth showed through the beard; I c