The valet hurried away, to return in three minutes gingerly carrying by its handles a tripod filled with glowing charcoal, that gave out a very satisfactory heat.
"Will monsieur rise now?"
"No," answered Claude. "Set it there. Bring the water in half an hour from now. He will be ready for you then."
The man bowed and disappeared, while Henri, from the bed, grumbled discontentedly: "How in the name of a thousand devils dost thou know at what hour I will rise? Wilt let me sleep again now, or not?"
"Not, Henri," was the reply, as Claude drew a tabouret up to the bed and spoke in a tone so new that his cousin sat up and looked at him.
"You are in trouble, Claude, and you do not tell me of it."
Claude leaned over the bed, took up the pillows, and fixed them, as a woman might, at the Marquis' back.
"Sit there so, and pull the coverlet about thy shoulders, and then listen to my history, and tell me—what the end will be."
Thereupon the younger de Mailly proceeded to recount, very accurately, with neither exaggeration nor palliation, all that had occurred on the previous night, together with certain incidents which had gone before, unthought of, but which now stood out from the tangle of life with significant relationship to the present situation. The Marquis listened closely, with increasing anxiety in his expression; and when Claude ceased to speak there was a silence between the cousins. It was this silence that forced upon the Count his first twinge of real dread.
"Well, Henri!" he said at last, with sharp intensity.