Dieu, "with this other body, whom no one is likely to claim! I may be
permitted to offer you that, if you are determined--though it may cost
me my place!--and after fourteen years' service! It you would appease
him, monsieur the marquis--though I do not know whether they ever take
money."

"I will appease him," said the old noble. "Go about your errand and be
quick."

The servant fled up the stairs.

"This man is not dead, my friend," said the Marquis du Plessy.

Skenedonk knew it.

"But he will not live long in this cursed crypt," the noble added. "You
will get into my carriage with him, we will take him and put him in hot
sheets, and see what we can do for him."

I could feel Skenedonk's antagonism giving way in the relaxing of his
muscles.

But maintaining his position the Oneida asserted:

"He is not yours!"

"He belongs to France."

"France belongs to him!" the Indian reversed.

"Eh, eh! Who is this young man?"

"The king."

"We have no king now, my friend. But assuming there is a man who should
be king, how do you know this is the one?"

If Skenedonk made answer in words it was lost to me. The spirit sank to
submergence in the body, I remember combating motion like a drugged
person.

Torpor and prostration followed the recurring eclipse as that followed
excitement and shock. I was not ill; and gathered knowledge of the
environment, which was different from anything I had before experienced.
De Chaumont's manor was a wilderness fortress compared to this private
hotel of an ancient family in the heart of Paris.

I lay in a bed curtained with damask, and looked through open glass
doors at a garden. Graveled walks, bosky trees and masses of flowers,
plats of grass where arbored seats were placed, stretched their vista to
a wall clothed in ivy, which proved to be the end of a chapel. For high
over the curtain of thick green shone a rose window. The afternoon sun
laid bare its fine staining, but only in the darkness when the church
was illuminated and organ music rolled from it, did the soul of that
window appear struck through with light.

Strange servants and Doctor Chantry by glimpses, and the old noble and
the Oneida almost constantly, were about me. Doctor Chantry looked
complacently through the curtains and wished me good-morning. I smiled
to see that he was lodged as he desired, and that his clothes had been
renewed in fine cloth, with lawn to his neck and silk stockings for his
shrunk cal