om he was committing himself! Guise had thought himself
secure in this very building, which we were about to enter. Coligny had
received the most absolute of safe-conducts from those to whom we
were apparently bound. The end in either case had been the same--the
confidence of the one proving of no more avail than the wisdom of the
other. What if the King of France thought to make his peace with his
Catholic subjects--offended by the murder of Guise--by a second murder
of one as obnoxious to them as he was precious to their arch-enemy in
the South? Rosny was sagacious indeed; but then I reflected with sudden
misgiving that he was young, ambitious, and bold.

The opening of the door interrupted without putting an end to this
train of apprehension. A faint light shone out; so feebly as to illumine
little more than the stairs at our feet. The marquis entered at once, M.
de Rosny followed, I brought up the rear; and the door was closed by a
man who stood behind it. We found ourselves crowded together at the foot
of a very narrow staircase, which the doorkeeper--a stolid pikeman in a
grey uniform, with a small lanthorn swinging from the crosspiece of
his halberd--signed to us to ascend. I said a word to him, but he only
stared in answer, and M. de Rambouillet, looking back and seeing what I
was about, called to me that it was useless, as the man was a Swiss and
spoke no French.

This did not tend to reassure me; any more than did the chill roughness
of the wall which my hand touched as I groped upwards, or the smell
of bats which invaded my nostrils and suggested that the staircase was
little used and belonged to a part of the castle fitted for dark and
secret doings.

We stumbled in the blackness up the steps, passing one door and then a
second before M. de Rambouillet whispered to us to stand, and knocked
gently at a third.

The secrecy, the darkness, and above all the strange arrangements made
to receive us, filled me with the wildest conjectures. But when the
door opened and we passed one by one into a bare, unfurnished, draughty
gallery, immediately, as I judged, under the tiles, the reality agreed
with no one of my anticipations. The place was a mere garret, without a
hearth, without a single stool. Three windows, of which one was roughly
glazed, while the others were filled with oiled paper, were set in one
wall; the others displaying the stones and mortar without disguise or
ornament. Beside the door through which