Louis, with a look of love for one,
a look of hate for the other, and a look of homage for the third. At the
hunchback's heels came Cocardasse and Passepoil, waiting on events. The
hunchback stood for a moment listening to the noise and jollity beyond
the doors. Then he turned to his followers:

"My enemy makes merry to-night. I think I shall take the edge off his
merriment by-and-by. But the trick has its risks, and we hazard our
lives. Would you like to leave the game? I can play it alone."

Cocardasse answered with his favorite salute: "I am with you in this if
it ends in the gallows."

Passepoil commented: "That's my mind."

Lagardere looked at them as one looks at friends who act in accordance
with one's expectation of them.

"Thanks, friends," he said. Then he sat at Gonzague's table, dipped pen
in ink, and wrote two hurried letters. One he handed to Cocardasse. "This
letter to the king, instantly." The other he handed to Passepoil. "This
to Gonzague's notary, instantly. Come back and wait in the anteroom. When
you hear me cry out, 'Lagardere, I am here,' into the room and out with
your swords for the last chance and the last fight."

Cocardasse laid his hand on the sham hump of the sham AEsop. "Courage,
comrade, the devil is dead."

Lagardere laughed at him, something wistfully. "Not yet."

Passepoil suggested, timidly: "We live in hopes."

Then Cocardasse and Passepoil went out through the antechamber, and
Lagardere remained alone with the Three Louis. He rose again and looked
at them each in turn, and his mind was hived with memories as he gazed.
Before Louis de Nevers he thought of those old days in Paris when the
name of the fair and daring duke was on the lips of all men and of all
women, and when he met him for the first time and got his lesson in the
famous thrust, and when he met him for the second and last time in the
moat at Caylus and gave him the pledge of brotherhood. Looking now on the
beautiful, smiling face, Lagardere extended his hand to the painted
cloth, as if he almost hoped that the painted hand could emerge from it
and clasp his again in fellowship, and so looking he renewed the pledge
of brotherhood and silently promised the murdered man a crown of revenge.

He turned to the picture of Louis de Gonzague, and he thought of his
speech in the moat of Caylus with the masked shadow, and of the sudden
murder of Nevers, and of his own assault upon the murderer, and how he
set his mark