On the night upon which such strange chances had befallen his messengers, the king sat alone in his cabinet. Over his head a perfumed lamp, held up by four little flying Cupids of crystal, who dangled² by golden chains from the painted ceiling, cast a brilliant light upon the chamber³, which was flashed back twenty-fold by the mirrors upon the wall. The ebony and silver furniture, the dainty carpet of La Savonniere, the silks of Tours, the tapestries⁴ of the Gobelins, the gold-work and the delicate chinaware of Sevres—the best of all that France could produce was centred between these four walls. Nothing had ever passed through that door which was not a masterpiece of its kind. And amid all this brilliance⁵ the master of it sat, his chin resting upon his hands, his elbows upon the table, with eyes which stared vacantly at the wall, a moody⁶ and a solemn man.

But though his dark eyes were fixed⁷ upon the wall, they saw nothing of it. They looked rather down the long vista⁸ of his own life, away to those early years when what we dream and what we do shade so mistily⁹ into one another. Was it a dream or was it a fact, those two men who used to stoop over his baby crib, the one with the dark coat and the star upon his breast, whom he had been taught to call father, and the other one with the long red gown and the little twinkling eyes? Even now, after more than forty years, that wicked, astute¹⁰, powerful face flashed up, and he saw once more old Richelieu, the great unanointed king of France. And then the other cardinal¹¹, the long lean one who had taken his pocket-money, and had

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