the game to the end, that to-morrow she might think of
him highly. Had she begun to think of him at all? In the chamber of the
inn at Angers he had fancied a change in her, an awakening to life and
warmth, a shadow of turning to him. It had pleased him to think so, at
any rate. It pleased him still to imagine--of this he was more
confident--that in the time to come, when she was Tignonville's, she
would think of him secretly and kindly. She would remember him, and in
her thoughts and in her memory he would grow to the heroic, even as the
man she had chosen would shrink as she learned to know him.

It pleased him, that. It was almost all that was left to please
him--that, and to die proudly as he had lived. But as the day wore on,
and the room grew hot and close, and the pain in his thigh became more
grievous, the frame of his mind altered. A sombre rage was born and grew
in him, and a passion fierce and ill-suppressed. To end thus, with
nothing done, nothing accomplished of all his hopes and ambitions! To
die thus, crushed in a corner by a mean priest and a rabble of spearmen,
he who had seen Dreux and Jarnac, had defied the King, and dared to turn
the St. Bartholomew to his ends! To die thus, and leave her to that
puppet! Strong man as he was, of a strength of will surpassed by few, it
taxed him to the utmost to lie and make no sign. Once, indeed, he raised
himself on his elbow with something between an oath and a snarl, and he
seemed about to speak. So that Bigot came hurriedly to him.

"My lord?"

"Water!" he said. "Water, fool!" And, having drunk, he turned his face
to the wall, lest he should name her or ask for her.

For the desire to see her before he died, to look into her eyes, to touch
her hand once, only once, assailed his mind and all but whelmed his will.
She had been with him, he knew it, in the night; she had left him only at
daybreak. But then, in his state of collapse, he had been hardly
conscious of her presence. Now to ask for her or to see her would stamp
him coward, say what he might to her. The proverb, that the King's face
gives grace, applied to her; and an overture on his side could mean but
one thing, that he sought her grace. And that he would not do though the
cold waters of death covered him more and more, and the coming of the
end--in that quiet chamber, while the September sun sank to the appointed
place--awoke wild longings and a wild rebellion in his breast. His
t