retarding the movement which sweeps on the
rest."

"Alchemy is the science of sciences!" cried Charles IX.,
enthusiastically. "I want to see you at work."

"Whenever it pleases you, sire; you cannot be more interested than
Madame the Queen-mother."

"Ah! so this is why she cares for you?" exclaimed the king.

"The house of Medici has secretly protected our Search for more than a
century."

"Sire," said Cosmo, "this child will live nearly a hundred years; he
will have trials; nevertheless, he will be happy and honored, because he
has in his veins the blood of the Valois."

"I will go and see you in your laboratory, messieurs," said the king,
his good-humor quite restored. "You may now go."

The brothers bowed to Marie and to the king and then withdrew. They went
down the steps of the portico gravely, without looking or speaking to
each other; neither did they turn their faces to the windows as they
crossed the courtyard, feeling sure that the king's eye watched them.
But as they passed sideways out of the gate into the street they looked
back and saw Charles IX. gazing after them from a window. When the
alchemist and the astrologer were safely in the rue de l'Autruche, they
cast their eyes before and behind them, to see if they were followed
or overheard; then they continued their way to the moat of the Louvre
without uttering a word. Once there, however, feeling themselves
securely alone, Lorenzo said to Cosmo, in the Tuscan Italian of that
day:--

"Affe d'Iddio! how we have fooled him!"

"Much good may it do him; let him make what he can of it!" said Cosmo.
"We have given him a helping hand,--whether the queen pays it back to us
or not."

Some days after this scene, which struck the king's mistress as forcibly
as it did the king, Marie suddenly exclaimed, in one of those moments
when the soul seems, as it were, disengaged from the body in the
plenitude of happiness:--

"Charles, I understand Lorenzo Ruggiero; but did you observe that Cosmo
said nothing?"

"True," said the king, struck by that sudden light. "After all, there
was as much falsehood as truth in what they said. Those Italians are as
supple as the silk they weave."

This suspicion explains the rancor which the king showed against Cosmo
when the trial of La Mole and Coconnas took place a few weeks later.
Finding him one of the agents of that conspiracy, he thought the
Italians had tricked him; for it was proved that his mother's astrologer