Her father was confined to bed with some ailment of the hour, and asleep—it were no good to awaken him. Her mind was at once made up. There was no time to ask permission of the Queen. She knew the surgeon’s messengers by sight, this one was in the usual livery, and his master’s name was duly signed. In haste she made herself ready, and went forth into the night with the messenger, her heart beating hard, a pitiful anxiety shaking her. Her steps were fleet between the lodge and the palace. They were challenged nowhere, and the surgeon’s servant, entering a side door of the palace, led her hastily through gloomy halls and passages where they met no one, though once in a dark corridor some one brushed against her. She wondered why there were no servants to show the way, why the footman carried no torch or candle; but haste and urgency seemed due excuse, and she thought only of Michel, and that she would soon see him-dying, dead perhaps before she could touch his hand! At last they emerged into a lighter and larger hallway, where her guide suddenly paused, and said to Angel, motioning towards a door: “Enter. He is there.”
For a moment she stood still, scarce able to breathe, her heart hurt her so. It seemed to her as though life itself was arrested. As the servant, without further words, turned and left her, she knocked, opened the door without awaiting a reply, and stepping into semidarkness, said softly:
“Michel! Michel!”
CHAPTER XVII
At Angle’s entrance a form slowly raised itself on a couch, and a voice, not Michel’s, said: “Mademoiselle—by our Lady, ‘tis she!”
It was the voice of the Seigneur of Rozel, and Angle started back amazed.
“You, Monsieur—you!” she gasped. “It was you that sent for me?”
“Send? Not I—I have not lost my manners yet. Rozel at Court is no greater fool than Lempriere in Jersey.”
Angle wrung her hands. “I thought it De la Foret who was ill. The surgeon said to come quickly.” Lempriere braced himself against the wall, for he was weak, and his fever still high. “Ill?—not he. As sound in body and soul as any man in England. That is a friend, that De la Foret lover of yours, or I’m no butler to the Queen. He gets leave and brings me here and coaxes me back to life again—with not a wink of sleep for him these five days past till now.”