"I am sure her Grace will not be interested in your private matters," said the Lady Clotilde coldly.
But the duchess was young enough to be interested in nonsense, and she demanded the whole story, Antoine explaining his part of it by saying that he had been waiting all day to be revenged upon his comrade because the latter had insisted upon his singing at the inn on the previous night. "But I did not know, your Highness, that he would sleep so long, else I should not have gone away and left him there. I was very unhappy about him when night came on and he had not yet arrived."
Just as Antoine had finished speaking, a servant came to announce the coming of some of her Grace's soldiers, saying that the captain of her troop desired an audience, which was granted at once.
An officer now entered, a dark-browed man with a somewhat forbidding face, who, after bending the knee to the duchess and saluting the company, began his story in the satisfied tone of one who feels that he has been quick to see his duty and has done it rather better than most people would have managed it in his place.
He said that he had stopped that morning at an inn for some refreshments, and that the innkeeper had shown him a gold piece given his child the night before by a little girl whose costume did not warrant the gift, and that the latter had seemed so much superior in station to the woman with whom she was traveling that he could not help fearing that the child was being unlawfully conveyed away.
Later the officer and his men had overtaken the mysterious couple, and after putting some questions the officer was convinced that the woman had been sent to Brittany by the French, for she had become very much confused when he questioned her, and implored him to allow her to go on her way unmolested. Her words and manner excited his suspicions still further, and without more ado he had taken them both prisoners, and had brought them to the palace with him. The woman was a foreigner, she said, but she acknowledged that she had lived for years in France, and he did not hesitate to say that he believed her to be a spy.
The Lady Anne, so far from being gratified by this intelligence, looked very much annoyed. "We are no longer at war with France," she said coldly. "It would have been better to have believed the woman's account of herself and let the two go on their way."
Considerably dismayed at thus being reproved where he had expected to be commended, the officer could not forbear to reply that France had broken her word with Brittany in the past, and who could tell but that she might be planning some new piece of treachery?
"Let the prisoners appear before me," said the duchess, and after some little delay the prisoners were brought in, and Le Glorieux and Antoine beheld—as the former, at least, had suspected—the same woman and child who had stopped at the inn on the previous night.
The woman was pale and frightened, and she sobbed bitterly as she knelt at the feet of her Grace of Brittany. The child too was pale, but she stood silent, with her small hands clasped before her, not offering to kneel, as did her companion.