we had entered stood a silent
figure in the grey uniform I had seen below, his lanthorn on the floor
at his feet. A second door at the farther end of the gallery, which
was full twenty paces long, was guarded in like manner. A couple of
lanthorns stood in the middle of the floor, and that was all.

Inside the door, M. de Rambouillet with his finger on his lip stopped
us, and we stood a little group of three a pace in front of the sentry,
and with the empty room before us. I looked at M. de Rosny, but he was
looking at Rambouillet. The marquis had his back towards me, the sentry
was gazing into vacancy; so that baffled in my attempt to learn anything
from the looks of the other actors in the scene, I fell back on my ears.
The rain dripped outside and the moaning wind rattled the casements; but
mingled with these melancholy sounds--which gained force, as such things
always do, from the circumstances in which we were placed and our own
silence--I fancied I caught the distant hum of voices and music and
laughter. And that, I know not why, brought M. de Guise again to my
mind.

The story of his death, as I had heard it from that accursed monk in the
inn on the Claine, rose up in all its freshness, with all its details.
I started when M. de Rambouillet coughed. I shivered when Rosny shifted
his feet. The silence grew oppressive. Only the stolid men in grey
seemed unmoved, unexpectant; so that I remember wondering whether it was
their nightly duty to keep guard over an empty garret, the floor strewn
with scraps of mortar and ends of tiles.

The interruption, when it came at last, came suddenly. The sentry at the
farther end of the gallery started and fell back a pace. Instantly the
door beside him opened and a man came in, and closing it quickly behind
him, advanced up the room with an air of dignity, which even his strange
appearance and attire could not wholly destroy.

He was of good stature and bearing, about forty years old as I judged,
his wear a dress of violet velvet with black points cut in the extreme
of the fashion. He carried a sword but no ruff, and had a cup and ball
of ivory--a strange toy much in vogue among the idle--suspended from his
wrist by a ribbon. He was lean and somewhat narrow, but so far I found
little fault with him. It was only when my eye reached his face, and
saw it rouged like a woman's and surmounted by a little turban, that a
feeling of scarcely understood disgust seized me, and I said to