pending the King's arrival, would see to it that none came
forward to recognize me. He would expedite the comedy of my trial, and
close it with the tragedy of my execution. My professions of a mistake
of identity--if I wasted breath upon them would be treated with disdain
and disregarded utterly. God! What a position had I got myself into, and
what a vein of comedy ran through it--grim, tragic comedy, if you will,
yet comedy to all faith. The very woman whom I had wagered to wed had
betrayed me into the hands of the very man with whom I laid my wager.

But there was more in it than that. As I had told Mironsac that night in
Paris, when the thing had been initiated, it was a duel that was being
fought betwixt Chatellerault and me--a duel for supremacy in the King's
good graces. We were rivals, and he desired my removal from the Court.
To this end had he lured me into a bargain that should result in my
financial ruin, thereby compelling me to withdraw from the costly life
of the Luxembourg, and leaving him supreme, the sole and uncontested
recipient of our master's favour. Now into his hand Fate had thrust a
stouter weapon and a deadlier: a weapon which not only should make him
master of the wealth that I had pledged, but one whereby he might
remove me for all time, a thousandfold more effectively than the mere
encompassing of my ruin would have done.

I was doomed. I realized it fully and very bitterly.

I was to go out of the ways of men unnoticed and unmourned; as a rebel,
under the obscure name of another and bearing another's sins upon my
shoulders, I was to pass almost unheeded to the gallows. Bardelys the
Magnificent--the Marquis Marcel Saint-Pol de Bardelys, whose splendour
had been a byword in France--was to go out like a guttering candle.

The thought filled me with the awful frenzy that so often goes with
impotency, such a frenzy as the damned in hell may know. I forgot in
that hour my precept that under no conditions should a gentleman give
way to anger. In a blind access of fury I flung myself across the table
and caught that villainous cheat by the throat, before any there could
put out a hand to stop me.

He was a heavy man, if a short one, and the strength of his thick-set
frame was a thing abnormal. Yet at that moment such nervous power did
I gather from my rage, that I swung him from his feet as though he had
been the puniest weakling. I dragged him down on to the table, and there
I ground his face