“Mon Dieu! my dear Abbé,” exclaimed the Comtesse des Forges, dropping her cards to let her languishing, heavy-lidded eyes linger on the smiling face of her latest protégé, “you make my blood run cold.”

“Brélan de rois” called the plump Duchesse de Pontchartrain, carefully noting the fact on her tablets before she allowed her suspicions to master her. “But are you quite sure?”

The dandy Abbé St. Victor with the air of a connoisseur compared the Venus on the cover of his snuff-box with the delicately-tinted shoulders of her grace.

“As sure,” he said slowly, “as Madame the Dauphine is dead, rest her poor German soul, and that Monsieur the Dauphin will marry again.”

It was Sunday evening a good year after Fontenoy. The Court was just out of mourning, to its great joy, and the Salon de la Paix at Versailles blazed with lights and with the jewels and silks of a brilliant throng, a few of whom were dispersed in groups making love or talking scandal over their chocolate, while the greater part were playing cards, the ladies at the fashionable brélan, the men at the dice which led to duels and mortgaged estates.

“It will be the deuce for the peace negotiations,” Philippe Comte de Mont Rouge remarked, scowling at the Abbé for no other reason than that he was condemned to sit at this table while Denise, the favourite of the Queen’s maids of honour, was talking in an alcove behind his back to the Chevalier de St. Amant.

“Go you, my dear Abbé,” said the Comtesse, “and bring Des Forges and St. Benôit here. Your news will excite them more than throwing three sixes running.”

“And,” added the Duchess in her pouting staccato, “put your head into the gallery yonder, dear friend, and see if my husband has finished his flirtation with that pretty wench of mine.”

“And if he hasn’t, Duchess?”

“Give them a plenary absolution and let them begin all over again,” interposed the Comtesse.

“To be sure,” the Duchess assented plaintively, “it will keep them both out of worse mischief. Really I cannot dismiss the girl. She washes my lace to perfection.” And she resettled the delicate trimming on her corsage for the benefit of the Comte de Mont Rouge.

“Well, what is it?” St. Benôit demanded.

The Abbé took a fresh pinch of snuff. “The messenger,” he said with no little excitement, “the messenger who was conveying secret instructions from the King to the army in Flanders was found last night in a ditch near Vincennes drugged, his arms and feet bound, and——”

“The despatches gone?”

“Naturally.”

The Comte des Forges meditatively licked his signet ring. “I knew something d-dreadful had hap-happened,” he stammered. “Why ever should I only be able to t-throw twos to-to-night?”

“What do you make of that?” asked Mont Rouge.

St. Benôit appeared to study his uniform of the Chevau-légers de la Garde in the mirror. His eye rested on Denise and her companion. “The second time in the last three months,” he muttered. “What does the courier say?”

“Say,” repeated the Comtesse des Forges, “say! Not a word, you may swear. The fool knows nothing till he woke to find a gag in his mouth and two peasants glaring at him as if he were the devil.”

“Pontchartrain,” remarked the Duchess, “is sure the man fell in with a siren at the cabaret where he had his supper. Pontchartrain knows most of the cabarets and all the sirens.”

“Wait, wait,” pursued the Abbé. “The courier was carrying not merely army despatches, but,” his voice dropped, “a private cipher message from His Majesty to the agent of the Jacobites.”

St. Benôit so forgot the etiquette of the Salon de la Paix as to whistle softly.

“B-by Jove!” stammered Des Forges.

“They say,” whispered the Abbé to his enthralled audience, “that the message was an invitation to Prince Charles Edward to ignore the King’s explicit promise to the English ambassador and to present himself at Versailles.”

“Dear Prince!” exclaimed the Duchess. “If only he would come to Court I believe I could make Pontchartrain jealous and still have my lace washed by Françoise.”

“I should kiss him, yes I should kiss him, the royal hero. You agree, Des Forges?” cried the Comtesse. “The English—pah! I would do anything to spite the English for their treachery to their lawful Prince.”

“But your kisses, ma mie,” replied her husband, “w-would only keep the P-prince from g-going again to seek his c-crown.”

“Pray what does the Comte des Forges know of madame’s kisses?” asked the Duchess innocently, and they all laughed, no one more heartily than the Comtesse herself.

“And this is serious,” said St. Benôit, “even more serious than the kisses of Madame la Comtesse.”

“And the King is really angry,” the Comtesse said. “M. d’Argenson came away from his audience this morning looking as if he had stolen the despatches himself.”

“And His Majesty remained on his knees at mass ten minutes after every one else had risen,” said the Abbé; “he always does when he is thoroughly angry.”

“I told you it would play the devil with the peace negotiations,” Mont Rouge commented.

“It is curious,” mused St. Benôit, “very curious that this infernal treason should begin again just when the Chevalier de St. Amant has returned to his duties.”

“The Chevalier?” they all questioned eagerly.

“Do you remember the night before Fontenoy,” St. Benôit continued, “when our friend André de Nérac saved the army from foul treachery? Well, I never could get the whole truth from him, but he allowed me to infer that the Chevalier was playing a very fishy part in the business.”

“Impossible,” protested the Duchess. “The Chevalier is on our side—the Queen’s side—the right side.”

“The Marquise de Beau Séjour, I suppose,” sneered the Comtesse, “is guarantee for that.”

“That is not worthy of you, dear lady,” St. Benôit corrected gently, looking into her great blue eyes as he had looked twelve months ago. “Mademoiselle de Beau Séjour is Mademoiselle de Beau Séjour. It will take more than a parvenu Italian chevalier to make her forget she is of the same quality and sex as the Comtesse des Forges. But I would wager a diamond bracelet to a sou that either the Chevalier is at the bottom of this dirty business—or,” he delicately sniffed at his lace handkerchief as one who feared infection, “or that woman.”

“Poisson-Pompadour, a fishy grisette,” sniggered Des Forges, playing on the name, “at the b-bottom of a f-fishy business—eh?”

“The Abbé can give us news again,” remarked Mont Rouge sweetly. “He attended the grisette’s toilet this morning.”

“Impossible!” the Comtesse exclaimed with sincere anger.

“He blushes, our dear friend,” pursued the remorseless Mont Rouge, “blushes a rose de Pompadour. Ha! ha!” The hit went home. Rose de Pompadour was the new colour invented in honour of the King’s favourite at the world-famed royal manufactory at Sèvres.

“The Duc de Pontchartrain was there too,” retorted the Abbé sulkily.

“That,” pouted the Duchess, “is a worse insult to me than if——”

“Than what, ma mignonne?” blandly inquired his Grace, who had stolen in upon the group. “I would have you know, ladies, that in a white peignoir, with her hair about her bare shoulders, the Marquise de Pompadour is the prettiest woman save one at Versailles, or Paris for that matter.”

“Every one,” laughed the Abbé, “knows that Monsieur le Duc is a connoisseur of painting.”

“And the name of the other divine grisette?” asked the Comtesse roguishly, for the Duke was studying her as he studied the coryphées of the opera or his race-horses.

The Duke kissed the plump fingers of his wife with the most charming grace imaginable. “The mirror will answer Madame la Duchesse,” quoth he.

“But my peignoir is blue,” she protested, “and even Françoise could tell you my shoulders on such occasions never are bare.”

“The more’s the pity.” St. Benôit bowed to the diamonds on her breast.

“Amen!” droned the Abbé in the officiating priest’s sing-song, and the Duchess dimpled with delight.

“The Abbé has not told you,” said the Duke, “how he sat on the f-fishy grisette’s bed. He is a bold man our spiritual friend. Listen. There were we all at madame’s toilet this morning—charming shoulders she has I repeat—and kept standing on our feet were we, for she is royal now is the Marquise, and no one may have a chair.”

“The insolence of the jade,” cried the Comtesse. “That Versailles should endure it!”

“And presently strides in the King. No chair for him either. Parbleu! My legs were breaking and so apparently were the Abbé’s. Presently I heard a crack, and there had our witty friend plumped himself down right on Madame’s bed. ‘With your permission, sire,’ he said with a comic cock of his eye, ‘but I am dead tired.’ And the King, who had come in as sulky as a bear, burst into laughter. ‘Look, Madame,’ he said, ‘look at this poor devil of an Abbé!’”

“And the Pompadour?”

“She shrugged her bare shoulders and laughed too, because the King was amused, but she put back her ears, very pretty ears, by the way, like a vicious horse. My faith! she will not forget ‘this poor devil of an Abbé.’”

“My friend, I could embrace you,” cried the Duchess.

“If you would only do it again,” said the Comtesse, “I would embrace you, too.”

“Do you remember De Nérac’s prophecy,” St. Benôit asked quietly, “that if that woman came to Versailles she would come to stay?”

“Ah! if only some one would poison her,” murmured the Duchess.

“Or another take her place,” cried the Comtesse.

“For the good of the country,” interposed the Duke, “I am quite ready to sacrifice the Duchess, even though she——”

“This is no jesting matter,” St. Benôit interrupted sharply. “The Queen and the ministers know that unless we can ruin this jade of the bourgeoisie France and we will be ruined. I wish to heaven André de Nérac were here instead of risking his life in Flanders to no purpose than the glory of the Pompadour.”

“A miracle, a miracle!” cried the Duchess, pointing with her fan.

At the end of the salon a little knot of excited courtiers had gathered, and in their midst stood the Vicomte de Nérac.

For a minute or two he halted, gazing about him with a slightly dazed air. The brilliant lights, the jewels and bare shoulders of the ladies, the uniforms and stars of the men, the rattle of the dice and the clatter of a hundred idle tongues seemed to awe him, familiar though he was with the scene. It was pleasant in this heavily-perfumed air with the flash of the candelabra on his riding cloak, faded uniform, and dusty boots, and on his tanned face, to mark the singularly bracing and vivid contrast that he presented to the luxurious idlers of his world. His eye had fallen on Denise. His shoulders straightened, his lips tightened, unconsciously.

“Depend on it,” St. Benôit whispered to the Duke. “André’s appearance has something to do with this damnable treachery.”

“Or,” added the Duke quietly, “with the schemes of that fishy grisette. The post of the master of her household is vacant.”

André was soon basking in the smiles of his lady friends, proud to welcome a hero who had saved an army of France. Ten minutes showed that he knew nothing of the mysterious affair at Vincennes, and he could only repeat that he had been summoned to Versailles by the express commands of his Sovereign. Why and for what he was ignorant.

The ladies in particular as they babbled watched him closely. Eighteen months of campaigning had not robbed his smile of its charm nor his dark eyes of their eloquent reserve. He was still the André de Nérac who had made more husbands jealous, more women rivals, than even the Duc de Richelieu. For Mademoiselle Claire, for Mademoiselle Eugénie, and the other maids of honour he had a bow and the finished compliment so dear to Versailles; he had even a friendly nod for the Chevalier de St. Amant. But to Denise’s curtsey a cold and correct salute in silence was all he deigned to reply. The rebuke made the eyes of the Comtesse des Forges very bright; indeed, it set the Salon de la Paix gossiping when he withdrew to remove the stains of his hard riding.

“This will ruin everything,” St. Benôit muttered, for he had both fears and plans in his head. So that when André and Denise suddenly met in the half-lights of the empty gallery neither knew the meeting was due to a friendly schemer.

The quick flush in Denise’s cheeks (she ravished the gay blades of Versailles by scorning powder and paint), the dropping of her grey eyes, sent a thrill into the soldier’s heart, but he kept a resolute silence.

“Madame your mother,” Denise began with an effort, “will be proud to welcome you back. Do you stay long at Versailles?” she added hurriedly, when he simply bowed.

“I do not know, Mademoiselle; I await His Majesty’s commands.”

“You are perhaps sorry to return?”

“I cannot tell—yet,” he replied with slow emphasis.

Denise flashed an inquiring glance. “What you will find here,” she said hurriedly, “cannot please a noble of France. A neglected and dishonoured queen—an adventuress——”

“We are in the King’s hands,” André interrupted with a dry smile.

“Yes. Versailles, France, are in the King’s hands,” she repeated despairingly. “Ah!” she cried with a sudden flash, “we want all who would help to—to—” the words died away under the chill of his demeanour.

“To banish the Marquise de Pompadour?” he inquired after a pause.

“Yes. There will be no peace nor honour for France until the Queen, my mistress, is restored to her place and that woman ceases to traffic in the affairs of a great kingdom.”

“I dare say you are right, Mademoiselle. Perhaps it is your business. It certainly is not mine.”

“Not yours? Why not? Are you not one of us, a soldier, a noble?”

“Doubtless, but,” he shrugged his shoulders, “I at least cannot forget that a worthless libertine——”

“I had hoped you had forgotten those words; you are cruel,” she interrupted, “you who have shown——”

“Say no more,” he exclaimed joyfully. “I have forgotten and I ask you to forgive. I was rude as well as cruel. Yes, I have come back as I swore I would to prove that I might be worthy of your regard, your love, Denise.”

He gently touched her hand and raised it to his lips.

“Of my love,” she said quietly, “you must not speak, if you please. But my regard you have already won in Flanders. And, André,” she continued earnestly, “there is work for you to do here. You will help us—us who would—ah!”

She broke off sharply, for one of the ushers of the King’s bed-chamber had swiftly come upon them.

“Monsieur le Vicomte,” he said, “His Majesty desires you to wait upon him at once in the salon of Madame la Marquise de Pompadour.”

“But—” André looked at his travel-stained cloak and boots.

“His Majesty desired Monsieur le Vicomte to attend just as he was.”

“Adieu,” Denise whispered, “and do not forget to-night that you are a noble and soldier of France.”

André turned angrily to obey, for the message from those pleading grey eyes had stirred all the fierce pride of his class. Confound this bourgeoise woman who ordered nobles to dance attendance in her salon!

“I will not forget, Denise,” he whispered back and his spurs rang defiance on the staircase which led to the second floor, where the favourite so loathed by the Court held sway.