CHAPTER IV
THE DUKE'S PROPOSAL
THERE was one very bitter heart in the maison on the following morning. Jacques Dauban had spent a bad night, groaning over aching bones and head, brooding over his wrongs and setting his cunning wits to work to devise a scheme of revenge.
Very ill results had followed that meeting with Lucette in the pine walk. She had kept the tryst and had wheedled out of him a part of what he knew. He had not told her much; only warned her to do her utmost to prevent the marriage between Gabrielle and Gerard de Cobalt, hinting at dark deeds of which he dared not speak, and denouncing Gerard as both an unscrupulous scoundrel and a tool in the hands of others greater and more villainous even than he.
She might have got more from him, but it chanced that Denys St. Jean had also conceived a fancy for a stroll in the wood, and had come suddenly upon the pair in close and intimate talk. His quick temper had fired instantly, and the consequences to Jacques Dauban had been serious. Denys was strong in the arm, and his cudgel, snatched hastily from a tree, thick and heavy; and there was scarcely a bone in the writhing, wriggling spy's body which did not ache and stab and pain.
And Lucette had laughed.
The laugh was the worst of all. It was in his ears all through the paining hours of the night; maddening him, taunting him, and goading him almost to a frenzy of wrath and spite. He read it as the proof that she had fooled him; that she had laid the trap to bring the
