I followed to calm
her. You entered; you know the rest."
"But what does it mean?"
"Can you not see?" he said, with growing faintness. "We have been
tricked,--I, by her pretense of love and by this appointment, to my
death; you, by a similar appointment and her screams, to make yourself my
slayer. I ought to have known! she belongs to Catherine, to the
Queen-mother. Alas, monsieur! easily fooled is he who loves a woman!"
Then I remembered what De Rilly had told me,--that De Noyard's counsels
to the Duke of Guise were an obstacle to Catherine's design of
conciliating that powerful leader, who aspired to the throne on which her
son was seated.
"No, no, monsieur!" I cried, unwilling to admit Mlle. d'Arency capable
of such a trick, or myself capable of being so duped. "It cannot be
that; if they had desired your death, they would have hired assassins to
waylay you."
Yet I knew that he was right. The strange request that Mlle. d'Arency had
made of me in the church was now explained.
A kind of smile appeared, for a moment, on De Noyard's face, struggling
with his expression of weakness and pain.
"Who would go to the expense of hiring assassins," he said, "when honest
gentlemen can be tricked into doing the work for nothing? Moreover, when
you hire assassins, you take the risk of their selling your secret to the
enemy. They are apt to leave traces, too, and the secret instigator of a
deed may defeat its object by being found out.
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