ood piles; but the lights of the college quarter beyond it, which
rose feebly twinkling to the crown of St. Genevieve, confused his sight
and rendered the nearer gloom more opaque. From that direction and from
the Cite to his right came sounds which told of a city still heaving in
its blood-stained sleep, and even in its dreams planning further
excesses. Now a distant shot, and now a faint murmur on one of the
bridges, or a far-off cry, raucous, sudden, curdled the blood. But even
of what was passing under cover of the darkness, he could learn little;
and after standing awhile with a hand on either side of the window he
found the night air chill. He stepped back, and, descending to the
floor, uncovered the lanthorn and set it on the table. His thoughts
travelled back to the preparations he had made the night before with a
view to securing Mademoiselle's person, and he considered, with a grim
smile, how little he had foreseen that within twenty-four hours he would
himself be a prisoner. Presently, finding his mask oppressive, he
removed it, and, laying it on the table before him, sat scowling at the
light.

Biron had jockeyed him cleverly. Well, the worse for Armand de Gontaut
de Biron if after this adventure the luck went against him! But in the
mean time? In the mean time his fate was sealed if harm befell Biron.
And what the King's real mind in Biron's case was, and what the Queen-
Mother's, he could not say; just as it was impossible to predict how far,
when they had the Grand Master at their mercy, they would resist the
temptation to add him to the victims. If Biron placed himself at once in
Marshal Tavannes' hands, all might be well. But if he ventured within
the long arm of the Guises, or went directly to the Louvre, the fact that
with the Grand Master's fate Count Hannibal's was bound up, would not
weigh a straw. In such crises the great sacrificed the less great, the
less great the small, without a scruple. And the Guises did not love
Count Hannibal; he was not loved by many. Even the strength of his
brother the Marshal stood rather in the favour of the King's heir, for
whom he had won the battle of Jarnac, than intrinsically; and, durable in
ordinary times, might snap in the clash of forces and interests which the
desperate madness of this day had let loose on Paris.

It was not the peril in which he stood, however--though, with the cold
clear eye of the man who had often faced peril, he appreciat