"So you have appeared again," Mayenne said. "I could almost believe myself back in night before last."
"Aye; at last I have." Lucas was all hot and ruffled, panting half from hurry, half from wrath.
"You saw fit to be absent last night," Mayenne went on indifferently, his eyes on the ring. "I trust, for your sake, you have used your time profitably."
"I have been about my own concerns," Lucas answered lightly, arming himself with his insolence against the other's disdain. In a moment he had mastered the excitement that brought him so stormily into the room. He was once more the Lucas who had entered that other night, nonchalant, mocking.
"Pretty trinkets," he observed, sitting down and lifting a bracelet from the tray.
The close kinship of these men betrayed itself in nothing so sharply as in their unerring instinct for annoying each other. Had Lucas volunteered explanation for his absence, Mayenne would not have listened to it; but as he withheld it, the duke demanded brusquely:
"Well, do you give an account of yourself? You had better."
Lucas repeated the tactics which he had found such good entertainment before. He looked with raised eyebrows toward us.
"You would not have me speak before these vermin, uncle?"
"These vermin understand no French," Mayenne made answer. "But do as it likes you. It is nothing to me."