rule, requiring their departure from the palace at nightfall, and had
taken this means of leaving to avoid discovery. If the former conjecture
embodied the truth, my sympathies were with the plot; for it little
pleased me that the wife of our Huguenot leader should remain at the
French court, a constant subject of scandalous gossip. If the second
guess was correct, I was glad of an opportunity to avert, even slight,
trouble from the wilful but charming head of Marguerite. In either case,
I might serve a beautiful woman, a queen, the wife of a Huguenot king.
Certainly, if that man, paid spy or accidental interloper, should reach
the guard-house with information that three men had left the Louvre by
stealth, the three men might be overtaken and imprisoned, and great
annoyance brought to Marguerite. All this occupied my mind but an
instant. Before the man had taken ten steps, I was after him.

He heard me coming, looked around, saw my hand already upon my
sword-hilt, and shouted, "The guard! Help!" I saw that, to avoid a
disclosure, I must silence him speedily; yet I dared not kill him, for he
might be somebody whose dead body found so near the palace would lead to
endless investigations, and in the end involve Marguerite, for suppose
that the King had set him to watch her? Therefore I called to him, "Stop
and face me, or I will split you as we run!"

The man turned at once, as if already feeling my sword-point entering his
back. Seeing that I had not even drawn that weapon, he, himself, drew a
dagger and raised it to strike. But I was too quick and too long of arm
for him. With my gloved fist I gave him a straight blow on the side of
the chin, and he dropped like a felled tree, at the very moat's edge,
over which I rolled him that he might recover in safety from the effects
of the shock.