ch
present for a friend. He was also the man to sit in the presence of his
enemy, unbetraying, tranquil, assured, waiting. It seemed to me that in
a few minutes more of this I should go mad; I should scream out: "Yes, I
am Felix Broux, and he is M. le Comte de Mar!"

But before I had verily come to this, something happened to change the
situation. Entered like a young tempest, slamming the door after him,
Lucas.

M. Etienne clutched me by the arm, drawing me back into the embrasure of
the window, where we stood in plain sight but with our faces blotted out
against the light. Mayenne looked up from two rings he was comparing,
one in each hand. Lucas, hat on head, came rapidly across the room.

"So you have appeared again," Mayenne said. "I could almost believe
myself back in night before last."

"Aye; at last I have." Lucas was all hot and ruffled, panting half from
hurry, half from wrath.

"You saw fit to be absent last night," Mayenne went on indifferently,
his eyes on the ring. "I trust, for your sake, you have used your time
profitably."

"I have been about my own concerns," Lucas answered lightly, arming
himself with his insolence against the other's disdain. In a moment he
had mastered the excitement that brought him so stormily into the room.
He was once more the Lucas who had entered that other night, nonchalant,
mocking.

"Pretty trinkets," he observed, sitting down and lifting a bracelet from
the tray.

The close kinship of these men betrayed itself in nothing so sharply as
in their unerring instinct for annoying each other. Had Lucas
volunteered explanation for his absence, Mayenne would not have listened
to it; but as he withheld it, the duke demanded brusquely:

"Well, do you give an account of yourself? You had better."

Lucas repeated the tactics which he had found such good entertainment
before. He looked with raised eyebrows toward us.

"You would not have me speak before these vermin, uncle?"

"These vermin understand no French," Mayenne made answer. "But do as it
likes you. It is nothing to me."

My master pinched my hand. Mayenne did not know us! After all, he was
what M. Etienne had called him--a man, neither god nor devil. He could
make mistakes like the rest of us. For once he had been caught napping.

Lucas leaned back in his chair with a meditative air, as if idly
wondering whether to speak or not. In his place I should not have
wondered one moment. Had Mayenne assured me in tha