Page:Stanley Weyman--Count Hannibal.djvu/297

Rh one desire now was to be quit of the matter, to have done with it, to escape; and one by one with the air of whipped curs they rose to their feet, and in a hurry to be gone muttered a word of excuse shamefacedly and got themselves out of the room. Lescot and the printer were not slow to follow, and in less than a minute the two strange preachers, the men from Paris, remained the only occupants of the chamber; save, to be precise, a lean official in rusty black, who throughout the conference had sat by the door.

Until the last shuffling footstep had ceased to sound in the still cloister no one spoke. Then Father Pezelay looked up, and the eyes of the two priests met in a long gaze.

“What think you?” Pezelay muttered at last.

“Wet hay,” the other answered dreamily, “is slow to kindle, yet burns if the fire be big enough. At what hour does he state his will?”

“At noon.”

“In the Council Chamber?”

“It is so given out.”

“It is three hundred yards from the Place Ste.-Croix and he must go guarded,” the Curé of St.-Benoist continued in the same dull fashion. “He cannot leave many in the house with the woman. If it were attacked in his absence”

“He would return, and” Father Pezelay shook his head, his cheek turned a shade paler. Clearly, he saw with his mind’s eye more than he expressed.

“Hoc est corpus,” the other muttered, his dreamy gaze on the table. “If he met us then, on his way to the house and we had bell, book, and candle, would he stop?”

“He would not stop!” Father Pezelay rejoined.

“He would not?”

“I know the man!”

“Then” but the rest St. Benoist whispered, his