caught your horse? You mind me? It was in the shock when we
broke Guasto's line--"

"At Cerisoles?" Count Hannibal muttered slowly. "Why, man, I--"

"I caught your horse, and mounted you afresh? You remember, my lord? And
at Landriano, where Leyva turned the tables on us again."

Count Hannibal stared. "Landriano?" he muttered bluntly. "'Twas in '29,
forty years ago and more! My father, indeed--"

"And at Rome--at Rome, my lord? _Mon Dieu_! in the old days at Rome!
When the Spanish company scaled the wall--Ruiz was first, I next--was it
not my foot you held? And was it not I who dragged you up, while the
devils of Swiss pressed us hard? Ah, those were days, my lord! I was
young then, and you, my lord, young too, and handsome as the morning--"

"You rave!" Tavannes cried, finding his tongue at last. "Rome? You
rave, old man! Why, I was not born in those days. My father even was a
boy! It was in '27 you sacked it--five-and-forty years ago!"

The old man passed his hands over his heated face, and, as a man roused
suddenly from sleep looks, he looked round the room. The light died out
of his eyes--as a light blown out in a room; his form seemed to shrink,
even while the others gazed at him, and he sat down.

"No, I remember," he muttered slowly. "It was Prince Philibert of
Chalons, my lord of Orange."

"Dead these forty years!"

"Ay, dead these forty years! All dead!" the old man whispered, gazing at
his gnarled hand, and opening and shutting it by turns. "And I grow
childish! 'Tis time, high time, I followed them! It trembles now; but
have no fear, my lord, this hand will not tremble then. All dead! Ay,
all dead!"

He sank into a mournful silence; and Tavannes, after gazing at him awhile
in rough pity, fell to his own meditations, which were gloomy enough. The
day was beginning to wane, and with the downward turn, though the sun
still shone brightly through the southern windows, a shadow seemed to
fall across his thoughts. They no longer rioted in a turmoil of defiance
as in the forenoon. In its turn, sober reflection marshalled the past
before his eyes. The hopes of a life, the ambitions of a life, moved in
sombre procession, and things done and things left undone, the
sovereignty which Nostradamus had promised, the faces of men he had
spared and of men he had not spared--and the face of one woman.

She would not now be his. He had played highly, and he would lose
highly, playing