ut I am going to the Princess Dowager's.
Afterwards to his Highness's. I may be detained an hour or more. You
will not like to wait so long."

M. de Tignonville's face fell ludicrously. "Well, no," he said. "I--I
don't think I could wait so long--to-night."

"Then come to-morrow night," Rochefoucauld answered, with good nature.

"With pleasure," the other cried heartily, his relief evident.
"Certainly. With pleasure." And, nodding good night, they parted.

While Rochefoucauld, with Nancay at his side and his gentlemen attending
him, passed along the echoing and now empty gallery, the younger man
bounded down the stairs to the great hall of the Caryatides, his face
radiant. He for one was not sleepy.

CHAPTER III. THE HOUSE NEXT THE GOLDEN MAID.

We have it on record that before the Comte de la Rochefoucauld left the
Louvre that night he received the strongest hints of the peril which
threatened him; and at least one written warning was handed to him by a
stranger in black, and by him in turn was communicated to the King of
Navarre. We are told further that when he took his final leave, about
the hour of eleven, he found the courtyard brilliantly lighted, and the
three companies of guards--Swiss, Scotch, and French--drawn up in ranked
array from the door of the great hall to the gate which opened on the
street. But, the chronicler adds, neither this precaution, sinister as
it appeared to some of his suite, nor the grave farewell which
Rambouillet, from his post at the gate, took of one of his gentlemen,
shook that chivalrous soul or sapped its generous confidence.

M. de Tignonville was young and less versed in danger than the Governor
of Rochelle; with him, had he seen so much, it might have been different.
But he left the Louvre an hour earlier--at a time when the precincts of
the palace, gloomy-seeming to us in the light cast by coming events, wore
their wonted aspect. His thoughts, moreover, as he crossed the
courtyard, were otherwise employed. So much so, indeed, that though he
signed to his two servants to follow him, he seemed barely conscious what
he was doing; nor did he shake off his reverie until he reached the
corner of the Rue Baillet. Here the voices of the Swiss who stood on
guard opposite Coligny's lodgings, at the end of the Rue Bethizy, could
be plainly heard. They had kindled a fire in an iron basket set in the
middle of the road, and knots of them were visible in the distan