“We are innocent,” said the grand-master of the Rosicrucians, proudly.
“So much the better for you,” said Marie, “for your laboratory, and your retorts and phials are now being searched by order of the king.”
The brothers looked at each other smiling. Marie Touchet took that smile for one of innocence, though it really signified: “Poor fools! can they suppose that if we brew poisons, we do not hide them?”
“Where are the king’s searchers?”
“In Rene’s laboratory,” replied Marie.
Again the brothers glanced at each other with a look which said: “The hotel de Soissons is inviolable.”
The king had so completely forgotten his suspicions that when, as he took his boy in his arms, Jacob gave him a note from Chapelain, he opened it with the certainty of finding in his physician’s report that nothing had been discovered in the laboratory but what related exclusively to alchemy.
“Will he live a happy man?” asked the king, presenting his son to the two alchemists.
“That is a question which concerns Cosmo,” replied Lorenzo, signing his brother.
Cosmo took the tiny hand of the child, and examined it carefully.