I had been watching the Duc’s face; a first red flush had come creeping from under the roots of his beard, and had spread over the low forehead and the sides of the neck.  The eye-glass fell from the eye, a signal for the colour to retreat.  The full lips grew pallid, and began to mutter unspoken words.  His eyes wandered appealingly from the woman beside him to me. I didn’t want to look him in the face.  The man was a trafficker in human blood, an evil liver, and I hated him.  He had to pay his price; would have to pay—­but I didn’t want to see him pay it.  There was a limit.

I began to excuse myself, and slid out between the groups of excellent plotters.  As I was going, she said to me: 

“You may come to me to-morrow in the morning.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

I was at the Hotel de Luynes—­or Granger—­early on the following morning.  The mists were still hanging about the dismal upper windows of the inscrutable Faubourg; the toilet of the city was being completed; the little hoses on wheels were clattering about the quiet larger streets.  I had not much courage thus early in the day.  I had started impulsively; stepping with the impulse of immediate action from the doorstep of the dairy where I had breakfasted.  But I made detours; it was too early, and my pace slackened into a saunter as I passed the row of porters’ lodges in that dead, inscrutable street.  I wanted to fly; had that impulse very strongly; but I burnt my boats with my inquiry of the incredibly ancient, one-eyed porteress.  I made my way across the damp court-yard, under the enormous portico, and into the chilly stone hall that no amount of human coming and going sufficed to bring back to a semblance of life.  Mademoiselle was expecting me.  One went up a great flight of stone steps into one of the immensely high, narrow, impossibly rectangular ante-rooms that one sees in the frontispieces of old plays.  The furniture looked no more than knee-high until one discovered that one’s self had no appreciable stature.  The sad light slanted in ruled lines from the great height of the windows; an army of motes moved slowly in and out of the shadows.  I went after awhile and looked disconsolately out into the court-yard.  The porteress was making her way across the gravelled space, her arms, her hands, the pockets of her black apron full of letters of all sizes.  I remembered that the facteur had followed me down the street.  A noise of voices came confusedly to my ears from between half-opened folding-doors; the thing reminded me of my waiting in de Mersch’s rooms.  It did not last so long.  The voices gathered tone, as they do at the end of a colloquy, succeeded each other at longer intervals, and at last came to a sustained halt.  The tall doors moved ajar and she entered, followed by a man whom I recognized as the governor of a province of the day before.  In that hostile light he looked old and weazened and worried; seemed to have lost much of his rotundity.  As for her, she shone with a light of her own.