About him things were to be seen that would have seemed stranger to him had he been less strange to the city.  From the quarter of the markets north of him, a quarter which fenced in the cemetery on two sides, the same dull murmur proceeded, which Mademoiselle de Vrillac had remarked an hour earlier.  The sky above the cemetery glowed with reflected light, the cause of which was not far to seek, for every window of the tall houses that overlooked it, and the huddle of booths about it, contributed a share of the illumination.  At an hour late even for Paris, an hour when honest men should have been sunk in slumber, this strange brilliance did for a moment perplex him; but the past week had been so full of fetes, of masques and frolics, often devised on the moment and dependent on the King’s whim, that he set this also down to such a cause, and wondered no more.

The lights in the houses did not serve the purpose he had in his mind, but beside the closed gate of the cemetery, and between two stalls, was a votive lamp burning before an image of the Mother and Child.  He crossed to this, and assuring himself by a glance to right and left that he stood in no danger from prowlers, he drew a note from his breast.  It had been slipped into his hand in the gallery before he saw Mademoiselle to her lodging; it had been in his possession barely an hour.  But brief as its contents were, and easily committed to memory, he had perused it thrice already.

“At the house next the Golden Maid, Rue Cinq Diamants, an hour before midnight, you may find the door open should you desire to talk farther with C. St. L.”

As he read it for the fourth time the light of the lamp fell athwart his face; and even as his fine clothes had never seemed to fit him worse than when he faintly denied the imputations of gallantry launched at him by Nancay, so his features had never looked less handsome than they did now.  The glow of vanity which warmed his cheek as he read the message, the smile of conceit which wreathed his lips, bespoke a nature not of the most noble; or the lamp did him less than justice.  Presently he kissed the note, and hid it.  He waited until the clock of St. Jacques struck the hour before midnight; and then moving forward, he turned to the right by way of the narrow neck leading to the Rue Lombard.  He walked in the kennel here, his sword in his hand and his eyes looking to right and left; for the place was notorious for robberies.  But though he saw more than one figure lurking in a doorway or under the arch that led to a passage, it vanished on his nearer approach.  In less than a minute he reached the southern end of the street that bore the odd title of the Five Diamonds.