His eyes were dead stones of irony. His expression was as of one hopeless of convalescence from the weary illness of life.
Ned fetched his letter from his breast.
“Citizen Egalité—if so I am to call you,” said he, “I meet you in the good hour, being on the road, indeed, to seek the citizen himself.”
“Me, sir?”
“You, monsieur—or the Duke of Orleans. I have the honour to place in the hands of the duke a packet with the delivery of which I have been entrusted by an intimate correspondent of monsieur.”
Monsieur, looking a little surprised, received the missive, and deliberately breaking the seal, deliberately read through madame la gouvernante’s letter. Ned must discipline his sick impatience the while, and the two other men conversed apart—David in some obvious wonder over the result of his introduction.
Presently the duke, carelessly returning the paper to its folds, looked up. Ned strove, but failed, to read his sentence in the impassive face. A moment’s silence succeeded. It was a test beyond his endurance.
“I undertook to acquaint monsieur le duc, from my personal knowledge,” he blurted out, “of the causes of madame’s apprehensions.”
“Madame,” said Egalité, “is very fortunate in a courier whose discretion, she informs me, is only equalled by his disinterestedness. Madame has, indeed, always the faculty to find some one to pull her her chestnuts out of the fire.”
He spoke so languidly, so suggestively, so insolently, that Ned, despite his desperate anxiety, fired up.