once loved so
dearly the man he believed to be his father. For, that he would meet
her, stand face to face with her, he supposed was certain. She would
scarce let an officer of the _chevaux-legers_ stay in her house--sent
there by the king's orders--and not summon him to her presence.
Moreover, did he not go there, as that evil-seeming bishop had said,
so that he might also hear a word possessing great significance to
both the king and his minister? A word of similar import to the one
the bishop had himself sent!

"Yet," he pondered, as now the hum from the busy old city reached his
ears and he saw its smoke rising in the evening air, "yet, does she
know who I am, whom I believe myself to be? Ha!" as a thought struck
him, "how else should it be? If De Roquemaure, her son, or stepson,
knows, then she must know too. And--and does she, too, wish me
dead--and you--you, also, my darling," with a pressure of his arm
against his burden, "as well? _Mon Dieu!_ If that is so, then it is to
the lion's jaws I am going in entering this manoir of hers. No matter!
I will do it. It is in the king's name I present myself; let us see
who dares assault his messenger. And," he muttered fiercely to
himself, "if her whelp, De Roquemaure, is the man with the brown
beard--the man whose voice I shall know in a thousand, although it
reached me before through iron bars--he shall have one more chance at
my life in spite of his lady mother." And he clinched his white teeth
as he reflected thus.

Knowing what he did, namely, that "the whelp, De Roquemaure," as he
had termed him, was heir in a year or two to De Vannes's great
fortune, and coupling with that fact that he and his child had been
attacked in a neighbourhood at no great distance from Troyes, he had
begun on his solitary ride this day to speculate as to whether the
whole of his journey, his sudden summons from Pontarlier to Paris, was
not some deeply devised plot to remove him out of existence. For,
although he had long suspected who and what he was, might it not be
the case that those in whose light he stood had only recently learned
that such was the case? And, if such were the fact, what a revelation,
what a blow, such knowledge would be to them! They had doubtless long
looked forward to the enjoyment of the Duc de Vannes's wealth; if they
had now discovered that the possession of that wealth might be
disputed, what more likely than that they should endeavour to remove
for ever from