elie de Roquemaure,
had spoken with her.

"I met her, _mon ami_," he wrote, "entering the gallery of audience at
Versailles where I was in attendance, and she looked, although pale,
for she wears no paint like the other _grandes dames_--I know not why,
since his Christian Majesty expects it----"

"She wore enough when I saw her last!" St. Georges muttered.

"--most beautiful. _Mon Dieu!_ what eyes, what a figure! I knew her
only from seeing her pass in to audience before, while as for me she
had never deigned so much as a glance. Yet now, _figurez vous, mon
ami_, she spoke to me while waiting for the others to pass before her.
'I have heard,' she said, speaking very low, 'that you are Monsieur
Boussac.' I answered that that was my name. Then, after a glance
around to see that no eyes were upon us, she went on: 'You did a
service once to an unhappy gentleman--a _chevau-leger_--now dead?'
What she was going to say further I know not, since I interrupted her
so by the slight start I gave that she paused in her intention,
whatever it may have been, raised her eyes to mine and regarded me
fixedly. Then she approached her face nearer to mine and whispered:
'Why do you start? He _is_ dead--is he not?' _Mon ami_, what could I
reply? She is the sister, by marriage, of your foe; if I told her you
lived, who knows what evil I might work? Therefore, I answered
briefly, 'Madame, the _galere_ L'Idole was sunk, and he was in it.'
Still she regarded me, however--_mon Dieu!_ it seemed as though her
eyes would tear the secret from out of my brains. Then--for now the
throng was moving on and she had to go with it--she whispered again:
'If--if by any hazard--he was not sunk with the galley--if he still
lives, there is news for him that would make him happy.' Then she
passed on with the others, and so out by the main gallery, and I have
not seen her since."

There was more in the letter, but at that time St. Georges read no
further. Once this news would have stirred every fibre in him, for
once he had believed that Aurelie de Roquemaure was his friend--was on
his side! He had long ceased, however, to do so; had, instead, come to
believe that she and her mother were as inimical to him as their
cowardly brother. And long months of meditation had brought him to the
belief also that the marquise's scorn against the man who had attacked
him and Boussac, and endeavoured to slay the child, was simulated;
that they regarded his and Dorine's ex