sullen anger burning in their hearts. And one
calling himself the servant of the Bishop of Nantes went about among
them, and his words were as knives, sharp and bitter beyond belief.
And ever as he spoke the men turned them about till they faced
Machecoul. Their lips moved like those of a Moslemite who says his
prayers towards Mecca. And the words they uttered were indeed prayers
of solemnest import.

With his usual devotion at such seasons, Gilles de Retz had attended
service thrice that day in his Chapel of the Holy Innocents. His
behaviour had been marked by intense devoutness. An excessive
tenderness of conscience had characterised his confessions to Pere
Blouyn, his spiritual director-in-ordinary. He confessed as his most
flagrant sin that his thoughts were overmuch set on the vanities of
the world, and that he had even sometimes been tempted of the devil to
question the right of Holy Church herself to settle all questions
according to the will of her priests and prelates.

Whereupon Pere Blouyn, with suave correctness of judgment, had pointed
out wherein his master erred; but also cautioned him against that
undue tenderness of conscience natural to one with his exalted
position and high views of duty and life. Finally the marshal had
received absolution.

In the late afternoon the Lord of Retz commanded the fire to be laid
ready for lighting in his chamber aloft in the keep of Machecoul, and
set himself down to listen to the singing of the choir, which, under
the guidance of Precentor Renouf, rehearsed for him the sweetest hymns
recently written for the choir of the Holy Father at Rome. For there
the marshal's choir-master had been trained, and with its leader he
still kept up a correspondence upon kindred interests.

Gilles de Retz, as he sat under the late blooming roses in the
afternoon sunshine of the autumn of western France, appeared to the
casual eye one of the most noble seigneurs and the most enlightened in
the world. He affected a costume already semiecclesiastic as a token
of his ultimate intention to enter holy orders. It seemed indeed as if
the great soldier who had ridden into Orleans with Dunois and the Maid
had begun to lay aside his earthly glories and seek the heavenly.

There, upon a chair set within the cloisters, in a place which the
sunshine touched most lovingly and where it lingered longest, he sat,
nodding his head to the sound of the sweet singing, and bowing low at
each mention of