“I would take your place,” La Tribe answered quietly.

“My place?”

“Yes.”

“What, are we too many?”

“We are enough without you, M. Tignonville,” the minister answered.  “These men, who have wrongs to avenge, God will justify them.”

Tignonville’s eyes sparkled with anger.  “And have I no wrongs to avenge?” he cried.  “Is it nothing to lose my mistress, to be robbed of my wife, to see the woman I love dragged off to be a slave and a toy?  Are these no wrongs?”

“He spared your life, if he did not save it,” the minister said solemnly.  “And hers.  And her servants.”

“To suit himself.”

La Tribe spread out his hands.

“To suit himself!  And for that you wish him to go free?” Tignonville cried in a voice half-choked with rage.  “Do you know that this man, and this man alone, stood forth in the great Hall of the Louvre, and when even the King flinched, justified the murder of our people?  After that is he to go free?”

“At your hands,” La Tribe answered quietly.  “You alone of our people must not pursue him.”  He would have added more, but Tignonville would not listen.

Brooding on his wrongs behind the wall of the Arsenal, he had let hatred eat away his more generous instincts.  Vain and conceited, he fancied that the world laughed at the poor figure he had cut; and the wound in his vanity festered until nothing would serve but to see the downfall of his enemy.  Instant pursuit, instant vengeance—­only these, he fancied, could restore him in his fellows’ eyes.

In his heart he knew what would become him better.  But vanity is a potent motive:  and his conscience, even when supported by La Tribe, struggled but weakly.  From neither would he hear more.

“You have travelled with him, until you side with him!” he cried violently.  “Have a care, monsieur, have a care, lest we think you papist!” And walking over to the men, he bade them saddle; adding a sour word which turned their eyes, in no friendly gaze, on the minister.

After that La Tribe said no more.  Of what use would it have been?

But as darkness came on and cloaked the little troop, and the storm which the men had foreseen began to rumble in the west, his distaste for the business waxed.  The summer lightning which presently began to play across the sky revealed not only the broad gleaming stream, between which and a wooded hill their road ran, but the faces of his companions; and these, in their turn, shed a grisly light on the bloody enterprise towards which they were set.  Nervous and ill at ease, the minister’s mind dwelt on the stages of that enterprise:  the stealthy entrance through the waterway, the ascent through the trap, the surprise, the slaughter in the sleeping-chamber.  And either because he had lived for days in the victim’s company, or was swayed by the arguments he had addressed to another, the prospect shook his soul.