ngs to do in the House of the Street of the Money. If only, then, he
could find La Nina. All turned on that.

"Ah," he thought suddenly, "the key! She has the key of the little door
giving upon the ancient bed of the Tet."

And, hastening down the passage by which, a few minutes before,
Valentine la Nina had led the Abbe John, he stumbled upon his niece,
fallen by the gate, her white dress and white face sombre under the dusk
of vine-leaves, which clambered over the porch as if it had been a
lady's bower.

But the key was not in her hand. With the single flash of intuition he
showed in the matter, John d'Albret had thrown it away, and it now
reposed in the bed of the Tet, not half a mile from the lost seal of the
Holy Office which, some time previously, his friend Jean-aux-Choux had
so obligingly disposed of there.

The Jesuit, in order to keep up his credit in the house of his friends,
was obliged to carry his niece to her summer bower, and leave her there
to recover in the coolness and quiet. Then he put on his out-of-doors
soutane, and passed calmly through the main portal to dispatch a
messenger of his own Order to the frontier with a description of a
certain John d'Albret, evaded from the prison of the Holy Office in the
Street of the Money at Perpignan--who, if caught, was by no means to be
returned thither, but to be held at the disposition of Father Mariana,
chief of the Order of the Gesu in the North of Spain, and bearing
letters mandatory to that effect from the King himself.

"For the present he is gone and lost," he murmured, as he went back;
"the minx has outwitted me"--here he chuckled, and all the soft childish
dimples came out--"yet why should I complain? It was I who taught her.
Or, rather, to say the truth, I outwitted myself--I, and that
incalculable something in women which wrecks the wisdom of the wisest
men!"

And, comforting himself with these reflections, Mariana returned alone
to the House of the Holy Office in the Street of the Money, which, of
necessity, he entered by the main door.

Now that buzzed like a hive, which had been silent and deserted enough
when he went out. The Jesuit stood in apparent bewilderment, his lips
moving as if to ask a question. He could hear Dom Teruel storming that
he would burn every assistant, every familiar in the building, from roof
to cellar, while Frey Tullio and Serra, the huge Murcian, made
tumultuary perquisition into every chamber in search of the r