t to him.

He took it, and looked at it, and opened it, but with so cold and
immovable an aspect as made my heart sink more than all that had gone
before. 'What is amiss?' I cried, unable to keep silence. ''Tis from the
king, sir.'

'A king in motley!' he answered, his lip curling.

The sense of his words did not at once strike home to me, and I
murmured, in great disorder, that the king had sent for me.

'The king knows nothing of it,' was his blunt answer, bluntly given. And
he thrust the paper back into my hands. 'It is a trick,' he continued,
speaking with the same abruptness, 'for which you have doubtless
to thank some of those idle young rascals without. You had sent an
application to the king, I suppose? Just so. No doubt they got hold of
it, and this is the result. They ought to be whipped.'

It was not possible for me to doubt any longer that what he said was
true. I saw in a moment all my hopes vanish, all my plans flung to the
winds; and in the first shock of the discovery I could neither find
voice to answer him nor strength to withdraw. In a kind of vision I
seemed to see my own lean, haggard face looking at me as in a glass,
and, reading despair in my eyes, could have pitied myself.

My disorder was so great that M. du Mornay observed it. Looking more
closely at me, he two or three times muttered my name, and at last said,
'M. de Marsac? Ha! I remember. You were in the affair of Brouage, were
you not?'

I nodded my head in token of assent, being unable at the moment to
speak, and so shaken that perforce I leaned against the wall, my head
sunk on my breast. The memory of my age, my forty years, and my poverty,
pressed hard upon me, filling me with despair and bitterness. I could
have wept, but no tears came.

M. du Mornay, averting his eyes from me, took two or three short,
impatient turns up and down the chamber when he addressed me again his
tone was full of respect, mingled with such petulance as one brave man
might feel, seeing another so hard pressed. 'M. de Marsac,' he said,
'you have my sympathy. It is a shame that men who have served the
cause should be reduced to such straits. Were it, possible for me, to
increase my own train at present, I should consider it an honour to have
you with me. But I am hard put to it myself, and so are we all, and the
King of Navarre not least among us. He has lived for a month upon a wood
which M. de Rosny has cut down. I will mention your name to him, but I