I had no heart to enter into his jocularity. This woman with her
ungovernable passion and her rash tongue had destroyed everything.

"I see no likelihood of being her daughter's husband," I answered
mournfully.

The King looked up, and laughed. "Down on your knees, then," said he,
"and render thanks to Heaven."

But I shook my head very soberly. "To Your Majesty it is a pleasing
comedy," said I, "but to me, helas! it is nearer far to tragedy."

"Come, Marcel," said he, "may I not laugh a little? One grows so sad
with being King of France! Tell me what vexes you."

"Mademoiselle de Lavedan has promised that she will marry me only when
I have saved her father from the scaffold. I came to do it, very full of
hope, Sire. But his wife has forestalled me and, seemingly, doomed him
irrevocably."

His glance fell; his countenance resumed its habitual gloom. Then he
looked up again, and in the melancholy depths of his eyes I saw a gleam
of something that was very like affection.

"You know that I love you, Marcel," he said gently. "Were you my own son
I could not love you more. You are a profligate, dissolute knave, and
your scandals have rung in my ears more than once; yet you are different
from these other fools, and at least you have never wearied me. To have
done that is to have done something. I would not lose you, Marcel; as
lose you I shall if you marry this rose of Languedoc, for I take it
that she is too sweet a flower to let wither in the stale atmosphere
of Courts. This man, this Vicomte de Lavedan, has earned his death. Why
should I not let him die, since if he dies you will not wed?"

"Do you ask me why, Sire?" said I. "Because they call you Louis the
Just, and because no king was ever more deserving of the title."

He winced; he pursed his lips, and shot a glance at La Fosse, who was
deep in the mysteries of his volume. Then he drew towards him a sheet of
paper, and, taking a quill, he sat toying with it.

"Because they call me the Just, I must let justice take its course," he
answered presently.

"But," I objected, with a sudden hope, "the course of justice cannot
lead to the headsman in the case of the Vicomte de Lavedan."

"Why not?" And his solemn eyes met mine across the table.

"Because he took no active part in the revolt. If he was a traitor, he
was no more than a traitor at heart, and until a man commits a crime
in deed he is not amenable to the law's rigour. His wife has made his
defection