“Mon Dieu! Monsieur Blanc-bec! Il n'y a pas de petit chez soi!” cried Thurot, dropping his hand, and they jumped to their feet to greet me.
“I'll be hanged if you want assurance, child,” said Clancarty, surveying me from head to foot as if I were some curiosity. “Here's your exploits ringing about the world, and not wholly to your credit, and you must walk into the very place where they will find the smallest admiration.”
“Not meaning the lodging of Captain Thurot,” said I. “Whatever my reputation may be with the world, I make bold to think he and you will believe me better than I may seem at the first glance.”
“The first glance!” cried his lordship. “Gad, the first glance suggests that Bicêtre agreed with our Scotsman. Sure, they must have fed you on oatmeal. I'd give a hatful of louis d'or to see Father Hamilton, for if he throve so marvellously in the flesh as his secretary he must look like the side of St. Eloi. One obviously grows fat on regicide—fatter than a few poor devils I know do upon devotion to princes.”
Thurot's face assured me that I was as welcome there as ever I had been. He chid Clancarty for his badinage, and told me he was certain all along that the first place I should make for after my flight from Bicêtre (of which all the world knew) would be Dunkerque. “And a good thing too, M. Greig,” said he.
“Not so good,” says I, “but what I must meet on your stair the very man-”
“Stop!” he cried, and put his finger on his lip. “In these parts we know only a certain M. Albany, who is, my faith! a good friend of your own if you only knew it.”
“I scarcely see how that can be,” said I. “If any man has a cause to dislike me it is his Roy—”
“M. Albany,” corrected Thurot.
“It is M. Albany, for whom, it seems, I was the decoy in a business that makes me sick to think on. I would expect no more than that he had gone out there to send the officers upon my heels, and for me to be sitting here may be simple suicide.”