M. de Richelieu laughed softly.
“She was a clever woman. I never knew her deceived. She was, in her way, quite marvellous. But I did not come to speak of her.”
“No, Monsieur, but to look on a curiosity, I suppose?”
M. de Richelieu rose to his feet with a shimmer of his violet watered silks, and said a curious thing.
“Are you—with the world forgone—happy?” he asked.
Luc looked over the house-tops at the setting sun that glittered over the roofs of the Isle of St. Louis.
“Yes,” he answered. He coughed, put his hand to the plain linen ruffles on his bosom, and sat down again in the worn chair.
“And yet you have lost everything!” exclaimed the Maréchal.
“I keep my soul,” smiled Luc; and his pallid, disfigured face glowed for a second into its old likeness.
“I have my soul,” said the Maréchal, “and all the world besides. What have you that I have not?”