ated, burning to defend my valour before mademoiselle. Then,
reflecting how much harm my hasty tongue had previously done me, and
that the path to freedom was now open before me, I said nothing. Nor had
I need. For as I turned she flashed over to Lucas and said straight in
his face:

"When you marry me, Paul de Lorraine, you will marry a dead wife."

XVII

_"I'll win my lady!"_

Lucas's prophecy came to grief within five minutes of the making. For
when the musketeer unbarred the house door for me, the first thing I saw
was the morning sun.

My spirits danced at sight of him, as he himself might dance on Easter
day. Within the close, candle-lit room I had had no thought but that it
was still black midnight; and now at one step I passed from the gloomy
house into the heartening sunshine of a new clean day. I ran along as
joyously as if I had left the last of my troubles behind me, forgotten
in some dark corner of the Hotel de Lorraine. Always my heart lifts
when, after hours within walls, I find myself in the open again. I am
afraid in houses, but out of doors I have no fear of harm from any man
or any thing.

Though Sir Sun was risen this half-hour, and at home we should all have
been about our business, these lazy Paris folk were still snoring. They
liked well to turn night into day and lie long abed of a morning.
Although here a shopkeeper took down shutters, and there a brisk
servant-lass swept the door-step, yet I walked through a sleeping city,
quiet as our St. Quentin woods, save that here my footsteps echoed in
the emptiness. At length, with the knack I have, whatever my
stupidities, of finding my way in a strange place, I arrived before the
courtyard of the Trois Lanternes. The big wooden doors were indeed shut,
but when I had pounded lustily awhile a young tapster, half clad and
cross as a bear, opened to me. I vouchsafed him scant apology, but,
dropping on a heap of hay under a shed in the court, passed straightway
into dreamless slumber.

When I awoke my good friend the sun was looking down at me from near his
zenith, and my first happy thought was that I was just in time for
dinner. Then I discovered that I had been prodded out of my rest by the
pitchfork of a hostler.

"Sorry to disturb monsieur, but the horses must be fed."

"Oh, I am obliged to you," I said, rubbing my eyes. "I must go up to M.
le Comte."

"He has been himself to look at you, and gave orders you were not to be
disturb