trick,' he continued, speaking with the same abruptness, 'for
which you have doubtless to thank some of those idle young
rascals without. You had sent an application to the king, I
suppose? Just so. No doubt they got hold of it, and this is the
result. They ought to be whipped.'

It was not possible for me to doubt any longer that what he said
was true. I saw in a moment all my hopes vanish, all my plans
flung to the winds; and in the first shock of the discovery I
could neither find voice to answer him nor strength to withdraw.
In a kind of vision I seemed to see my own lean, haggard face
looking at me as in a glass, and, reading despair in my eyes,
could have pitied myself.

My disorder was so great that M. du Mornay observed it. Looking
more closely at me, he two or three times muttered my name, and
at last said, 'M. de Marsac? Ha! I remember. You were in the
affair of Brouage, were you not?'

I nodded my head in token of assent, being unable at the moment
to speak, and so shaken that perforce I leaned against the wall,
my head sunk on my breast. The memory of my age, my forty years,
and my poverty, pressed hard upon me, filling me with despair and
bitterness. I could have wept, but no tears came.

M. du Mornay, averting his eyes from me, took two or three short,
impatient turns up and down the chamber. When he addressed me
again his tone was full of respect, mingled with such petulance
as one brave man might feel, seeing another so hard pressed. 'M.
de Marsac,' he said, 'you have my sympathy. It is a shame that