La Mole took it and turned it over and over.
It was really his.
"Ah! ah!" said he, "is there some magic under all this?" Then with a sigh, "Ah! if poor Coconnas could be found like my sword!"
Two or three hours after La Mole had ceased his circular tramp around the small double house, the door on the Rue Tizon had opened. It was about five o'clock in the evening, consequently night had closed in.
A woman wrapped in a long cloak trimmed with fur, accompanied by an attendant, came out of the door which was held open by a duenna of forty, and hurrying rapidly along to the Rue Roi de Sicile, knocked at a small door of the Hôtel Argenson, which opened for her; she then left by the main entrance of the same hôtel which opened on to the Vieille Rue du Temple, went toward a small postern in the Hôtel de Guise, unlocked it with a key which she carried in her pocket, and disappeared.
Half an hour later a young man with bandaged eyes left by the same door of the small house, guided by a woman who led him to the corner of the Rue Geoffroy Lasnier and La Mortellerie. There she asked him to count fifty steps and then remove his bandage.
The young man carefully obeyed the order, and when he had counted fifty, removed the handkerchief from his eyes.
"By Heaven!" cried he, looking around. "I'll be hanged if I know where I am! Six o'clock!" he cried, as the clock of Notre-Dame struck, "and poor La Mole, what can have become of him? Let us run to the Louvre, perhaps they may have news of him there."
Coconnas hurriedly descended the Rue La Mortellerie, and reached the gates of the Louvre in less time than it would have taken an ordinary horse. As he went he jostled and knocked down the moving hedge of brave bourgeois who were walking peacefully about the shops of the Place de Baudoyer, and entered the palace.
There he questioned the Swiss and the sentinel. The former thought they had seen Monsieur de la Mole enter that morning, but had not seen him go out.