doubt the man was a traitor,' M. de Rosny answered delicately.
'His life was forfeit, sire. Who can question it?'

'And he has paid the forfeit,' the king rejoined, looking down at
the floor and immediately falling into a moodiness as sudden as his
excitement. His lips moved. He muttered something inaudible, and began
to play absently with his cup and ball, his mind occupied apparently
with a gloomy retrospect. 'M. de Guise, M. de Guise,' he murmured at
last, with a sneer and an accent of hate which told of old humiliations
long remembered. 'Well, damn him, he is dead now. He is dead. But being
dead he yet troubles us. Is not that the verse, father? Ha!' with a
start, 'I was forgetting. But that is the worst wrong he has done me,'
he continued, looking up and growing excited again. 'He has cut me off
from Mother Church. There is hardly a priest comes near me now, and
presently they will excommunicate me. And, as I hope for salvation, the
Church has no more faithful son than me.'

I believe he was on the point, forgetting M. de Rosny's presence there
and his errand, of giving way to unmanly tears, when M. de Rambouillet,
as if by accident, let the heel of his scabbard fall heavily on the
floor. The king started, and passing his hand once or twice across his
brow, seemed to recover himself. 'Well,' he said, 'no doubt we shall
find a way out of our difficulties.'

'If your Majesty,' Rosny answered respectfully, 'would accept the aid my
master proffers, I venture to think that they would vanish the quicker.'

'You think so,' Henry rejoined. 'Well, give me your shoulder. Let us
walk a little.' And, signing to Rambouillet to leave him, he began to
walk up and down with M. de Rosny, talking familiarly with him in an
undertone.

Only such scraps of the conversation as fell from them when they turned
at my end of the gallery now reached me. Patching these together,
however, I managed to understand somewhat. At one turn I heard the king
say, 'But then Turenne offers--' At the next, 'Trust him? Well, I do not
know why I should not. He promises--' Then 'A Republic, Rosny? That
his plan? Pooh! he dare not. He could not. France is a kingdom by the
ordinance of God in my family.'

I gathered from these and other chance words, which I have since
forgotten, that M. de Rosny was pressing the king to accept the help of
the King of Navarre, and warning him against the insidious offers of the
Vicomte de Turenne. The mention of a Repub