"Ay, my lord, I understand. I am not afeard. Yet I wish I had the wherewithal for supper. I am parlous hungry----"
"Bah! Keep watch well." Whereon I entered by the half-open door, and joined Damaris.
It was quite dark in the passage when I got there--except for the rays of the moon, which glinted and glistened from windows on high--there being no lights in the house so far as I could see. Then, while I was noting this, my girl whispered to me, "There are two in the garden now. I have seen them! have been close to them! Do you know what they are here for, in their long cloaks and vizard-masks?"
"Menials, I take it. Menials come to--to--O Adrian!"
"I understand. Damaris, you have got to pay me for this service."
"I thought," she whispered, "that English gentlemen, English noblemen, did not ask payment from ladies for services rendered."
"One payment it is always permissible to ask. I mean to have it too."
"It is impossible," she said--"impossible."
"I intend to make it possible. You told me I was very masterful, and I shall be--if I live through this night."
Whereon she only whispered again, "O Adrian!" and then said, "Come and see these men; and--and--loosen your sword in its sheath."
After which I followed her along the dark corridor or passage, and through a hall, large and lofty--they had built good houses in the old days in that portion of Paris known as the Marais--from out of which there opened the reception saloons, as well as a great _salle_ or banqueting-room. Now, into that hall there shone, from two great windows high up on either side of it, the full moon, so that I could perceive the form of my young princess almost as clearly as I might have done in daylight, and to my intense astonishment I observed that she was very little like a princess now, if such personages are to be judged by the garb they wear. For, now, she was arrayed in the dark Nîmes serge of a waiting-maid; upon her head was the provincial cap worn by so many of those women, hers being the head-dress of Brittany, which, as all the travelled world knows, hides every hair upon a woman's head and quite destroys any good looks that a serving-girl may happen to possess. And I noticed, too, that her hands were no longer adorned with flashing gems; nor were they either the little white snowflakes I had always gazed upon with such rapture--since now they were of a discoloured yellow-brown hue, and the nails discoloured also.