Count Hannibal’s gaiety, however, was well grounded, had they known it.  He was gay, not because he foresaw peril, and it was his nature to love peril; not—­in the main, though a little, perhaps—­because he knew that the woman whose heart he desired to win had that night stood between him and death; not, though again a little, perhaps, because she had confirmed his choice by conduct which a small man might have deprecated, but which a great man loved; but chiefly, because the events of the night had placed in his grasp two weapons by the aid of which he looked to recover all the ground he had lost—­lost by his impulsive departure from the pall of conduct on which he had started.

Those weapons were Tignonville, taken like a rat in a trap by the rising of the water; and the knowledge that the Countess had stolen the precious packet from his pillow.  The knowledge—­for he had lain and felt her breath upon his cheek, he had lain and felt her hand beneath his pillow, he had lain while the impulse to fling his arms about her had been almost more than he could tame!  He had lain and suffered her to go, to pass out safely as she had passed in.  And then he had received his reward in the knowledge that, if she robbed him, she robbed him not for herself; and that where it was a question of his life she did not fear to risk her own.

When he came, indeed, to that point, he trembled.  How narrowly had he been saved from misjudging her!  Had he not lain and waited, had he not possessed himself in patience, he might have thought her in collusion with the old lover whom he found at her door, and with those who came to slay him.  Either he might have perished unwarned; or escaping that danger, he might have detected her with Tignonville and lost for all time the ideal of a noble woman.

He had escaped that peril.  More, he had gained the weapons we have indicated; and the sense of power, in regard to her, almost intoxicated him.  Surely if he wielded those weapons to the best advantage, if he strained generosity to the uttermost, the citadel of her heart must yield at last!

He had the defect of his courage and his nature, a tendency to do things after a flamboyant fashion.  He knew that her act would plunge him in perils which she had not foreseen.  If the preachers roused the Papists of Angers, if he arrived to find men’s swords whetted for the massacre and the men themselves awaiting the signal, then if he did not give that signal there would be trouble.  There would be trouble of the kind in which the soul of Hannibal de Tavannes revelled, trouble about the ancient cathedral and under the black walls of the Angevin castle; trouble amid which the hearts of common men would be as water.

Then, when things seemed at their worst, he would reveal his knowledge.  Then, when forgiveness must seem impossible, he would forgive.  With the flood of peril which she had unloosed rising round them, he would say, “Go!” to the man who had aimed at his life; he would say to her, “I know, and I forgive!” That, that only, would fitly crown the policy on which he had decided from the first, though he had not hoped to conduct it on lines so splendid as those which now dazzled him.