I was met by Vallon, who said he had informed his master of my coming; and, telling a servant to hold my horse, he ushered me in, talking of a hundred things at once. I had not gone ten steps up the great stairway when Belin himself appeared, running down to meet me. 'Croix Dieu!' he burst out as we embraced. 'I thought you were with the saints, and that de Rône, you and a hundred others were free from all earthly troubles.'
'Not yet, de Belin. I trust that time will be far distant.'
'Amen! But you as good as buried yourself alive, at any rate.'
'How so?'
'Vallon tells me you have been a month in Paris, and you have never once been to the Rue de Bourdonnais until now. You might have known, man, that this house is as much yours as mine.'
'My dear friend, there were reasons.'
He put a hand on each of my shoulders, looked at me in the face with kind eyes, and then laughed out.
'Reasons! Pardieu! I can hardly make you out. You have a face a half-toise in length, never a plume in your hat, and a general look of those hard-praying and, I will say, hard-fighting gentry who gave the King his own again.'
'How loyal you have become.'
'We were all wrong—the lot of us—and I own my mistake; but you—you have not turned Huguenot, have you?'