But the order did not leave his lips. He felt that it were better to leave the matter as it was. If only he could find Valentine la Niña, no one would know of her part in the prisoner's escape. It could be put down to the carelessness of the watchers. The principal familiars were at their work deep in the caves of the Inquisition. The eyes in the prisoner's cell were painted eyes only--their effect merely moral. None had seen John d'Albret go into the summer parlour of Valentine. None had heard her interview, stormy as it was, with her uncle. They had other things to do in the House of the Street of the Money. If only, then, he could find La Niña. All turned on that.
"Ah," he thought suddenly, "the key! She has the key of the little door giving upon the ancient bed of the Tet."
And, hastening down the passage by which, a few minutes before, Valentine la Niña had led the Abbé John, he stumbled upon his niece, fallen by the gate, her white dress and white face sombre under the dusk of vine-leaves, which clambered over the porch as if it had been a lady's bower.
But the key was not in her hand. With the single flash of intuition he showed in the matter, John d'Albret had thrown it away, and it now reposed in the bed of the Tet, not half a mile from the lost seal of the Holy Office which, some time previously, his friend Jean-aux-Choux had so obligingly disposed of there.
The Jesuit, in order to keep up his credit in the house of his friends, was obliged to carry his niece to her summer bower, and leave her there to recover in the coolness and quiet. Then he put on his out-of-doors soutane, and passed calmly through the main portal to dispatch a messenger of his own Order to the frontier with a description of a certain John d'Albret, evaded from the prison of the Holy Office in the Street of the Money at Perpignan--who, if caught, was by no means to be returned thither, but to be held at the disposition of Father Mariana, chief of the Order of the Gesù in the North of Spain, and bearing letters mandatory to that effect from the King himself.
"For the present he is gone and lost," he murmured, as he went back; "the minx has outwitted me"--here he chuckled, and all the soft childish dimples came out--"yet why should I complain? It was I who taught her. Or, rather, to say the truth, I outwitted myself--I, and that incalculable something in women which wrecks the wisdom of the wisest men!"