breakfast like a lord, but I should have to beg for my dinner. I had
bragged of Monsieur's fondness, and I should have to tell how I had been
flung under the coach-wheels. My pace slackened to a stop. I could not
bring myself to enter the door. I tried to think how to better my story,
so to tell it that it should redound to my credit. But my invention
stuck in my pate.

As I stood striving to summon up a jaunty demeanour, I found myself
gazing straight at the shuttered house, and of a sudden my thoughts
shifted back to my vision.

Those murdered Huguenots, dead and gone ere I was born, had appeared to
me as plain as the men I passed in the street. Though I had beheld them
but the space of a lightning-flash, I could call up their faces like
those of my comrades. One, the nearest me, was small, pale, with
pinched, sharp face, somewhat rat-like. The second man was conspicuously
big and burly, black-haired and-bearded. The third and youngest--all
three were young--stood with his hand on Blackbeard's shoulder. He, too,
was tall, but slenderly built, with clear-cut visage and fair hair
gleaming in the glare. One moment I saw them, every feature plain; the
next they had vanished like a dream.

It was an unholy thing, no doubt, yet it held me with a shuddery
fascination. Was it indeed a portent, this rising of heretics from their
unblessed graves? And why had it been shown to me, true son of the
Church? Had any one else ever seen what I had seen? Maître Jacques had
hinted at further terrors, and said no one dared enter the place. Well,
grant me but the opportunity, and I would dare.

Thus was hatched in my brain the notion of forcing an entrance into that