eyes flickered with
unholy amusement.

"And the alarm that brings him from the Council Chamber?"

"Need not of necessity be real. The pinch will be to make use of it.
Make use of it--and the hay will burn!"

"You think it will?"

"What can one man do against a thousand? His own people dare not support
him."

Father Pezelay turned to the lean man who kept the door, and, beckoning
to him, conferred a while with him in a low voice.

"A score or so I might get," the man answered presently, after some
debate. "And well posted, something might be done. But we are not in
Paris, good father, where the Quarter of the Butchers is to be counted
on, and men know that to kill Huguenots is to do God service! Here"--he
shrugged his shoulders contemptuously--"they are sheep."

"It is the King's will," the priest answered, frowning on him darkly.

"Ay, but it is not Tavannes'," the man in black answered with a grimace.
"And he rules here to-day."

"Fool!" Pezelay retorted. "He has not twenty with him. Do you do as I
say, and leave the rest to Heaven!"

"And to you, good master?" the other answered. "For it is not all you
are going to do," he continued, with a grin, "that you have told me.
Well, so be it! I'll do my part, but I wish we were in Paris. St.
Genevieve is ever kind to her servants."

CHAPTER XXIX. THE ESCAPE.

In a small back room on the second floor of the inn at Angers, a mean,
dingy room which looked into a narrow lane, and commanded no prospect
more informing than a blind wall, two men sat, fretting; or, rather, one
man sat, his chin resting on his hand, while his companion, less patient
or more sanguine, strode ceaselessly to and fro. In the first despair of
capture--for they were prisoners--they had made up their minds to the
worst, and the slow hours of two days had passed over their heads without
kindling more than a faint spark of hope in their breasts. But when they
had been taken out and forced to mount and ride--at first with feet tied
to the horses' girths--they had let the change, the movement, and the
open air fan the flame. They had muttered a word to one another, they
had wondered, they had reasoned. And though the silence of their
guards--from whose sour vigilance the keenest question drew no
response--seemed of ill-omen, and, taken with their knowledge of the man
into whose hands they had fallen, should have quenched the spark, these
two, having special reasons, the one