k from this day.'

'It must be no idle tale, mind you,' the king continued suspiciously.

'You shall have Turenne's designs, sire, from one who had them from his
own mouth.'

The king looked startled, but after a pause turned and resumed his walk.
'Well,' he said, 'if you do that, I on my part--'

The rest I lost, for the two passing to the farther end of the gallery,
came to a standstill there, balking my curiosity and Rambouillet's also.
The marquis, indeed, began to betray his impatience, and the great clock
immediately over our heads presently striking the half-hour after ten,
he started and made as if he would have approached the king. He checked
the impulse, however, but still continued to fidget uneasily, losing his
reserve by-and-by so far as to whisper to me that his Majesty would be
missed.

I had been, up to this point, a silent and inactive spectator of a
scene which appealed to my keenest interests and aroused my most ardent
curiosity. Surprise following surprise, I had begun to doubt my own
identity; so little had I expected to find myself first in the presence
of the Most Christian King--and that under circumstances as strange and
bizarre as could well be imagined--and then an authorised witness at
a negotiation upon which the future of all the great land of France
stretching for so many hundred leagues on every side of us, depended. I
say I could scarcely believe in my own identity; or that I was the same
Gaston de Marsac who had slunk, shabby and out-at-elbows, about St. Jean
d'Angely. I tasted the first sweetness of secret power, which men say is
the sweetest of all and the last relinquished; and, the hum of
distant voices and laughter still reaching me at intervals, I began to
understand why we had been admitted with, so much precaution, and to
comprehend the gratification of M. de Rosny when the promise of this
interview first presented to him the hope of effecting so much for his
master and for France.

Now I was to be drawn into the whirlpool itself. I was still travelling
back over the different stages of the adventure which had brought me to
this point, when I was rudely awakened by M. de Rosny calling my name
in a raised voice. Seeing, somewhat late, that he was beckoning to me
to approach, I went forward in a confused and hasty fashion; kneeling
before the king as I had seen him kneel, and then rising to give ear to
his Majesty's commands. Albeit, having expected nothing less than to be