"Aurélie," she cried, "was this the gentleman whom you hurried to Paris to save?"
"To save!" St. Georges exclaimed, "to save! My God! do I owe my life to you as well?"
And Aurélie—her eyes cast down, her frame trembling from head to foot—murmured: "I could not let you die, knowing what I did, knowing the evil the De Roquemaures had wrought you. When Monsieur Boussac sent me word you were doomed, I determined to tell the king all."
So she had saved him! She, whom for four years he had regarded as a treacherous enemy, had saved not only his child but him. And ere the day was over he had learned all that she had done besides.
She told her tale to St. Georges and to Boussac as they sat in the grounds of the old manoir, and made at last all clear to the former that for so long had been dark and impenetrable.
"The man who was your worst enemy," she said, "was that vile Bishop of Lodève; the next was Louvois—for without them my unhappy brother would have known nothing and could have attempted no harm against you. He regarded himself as the heir of the Duc de Vannes, and did not know of your existence until Phélypeaux told him of it. And at the same time the bishop said that he had another formidable rival in the Romish Church——"
"The Romish Church!"
"Yes, your father had become converted to it and was received into it by Phélypeaux himself, the example of Turenne having much influenced him. At first, on being received, he had, with the fervour of many converts, bequeathed half of his great fortune to that Church, the other half remaining a bequest to his heir—my father, and after him my unhappy half-brother. But, ere he set out on the campaign in which both he and Turenne were to lose their lives, he wrote to the bishop and told him that he had a son by an unacknowledged marriage; that he could not deem it right that he should be deprived of what was properly his, and that he had made a will leaving all his property to him. Then the search for you began, though my brother was not concerned in it, being still a child. But the bishop sought high and low, first for proofs of the marriage and next to discover where the duke's son was. And Louvois helped him because he had hated your father, who despised him, as Turenne and many of the other marshals did."
"But you, mademoiselle," exclaimed St. Georges, "how do you know all this? And did you know it when we first met?"