"I have come," she made answer at last, in the deep even tones which she had used before the council of the traitors at Stirling, "to demand from you, Messire Gilles de Retz, what you mean to do with the little Margaret Douglas and her companion, whom you wickedly kidnapped from their own country and have brought with you in your train to France?"
"I have satisfaction in informing you," replied the marshal, suavely, "that it is my purpose to dispose of both these agreeable young ladies entirely according to my own pleasure."
The girl caught at her breast with her hand, as if to stay a sudden spasm of pain.
"Not at Tiffauges—" she gasped, "not at Champtocé?"
The marshal leaned back, enjoying her terror, as one tastes in slow sips a rare brand of wine. He found the flavour of her fears delicious.
"No, Sybilla," he replied at last, "neither at Champtocé nor yet at Tiffauges—for the present, that is, unless some of your Scottish friends come over to rescue them out of my hands."
"How, then, do you intend to dispose of them?" she urged.
"I shall send them to your puking sister and her child, hiding their heads and sewing their samplers at Machecoul. What more can you ask? Surely the young and fair are safe in such worthy society, even if they may chance to find it a little dull."
"How can I believe him, or know that for once he will forego his purposes of hell?" Sybilla murmured, half to herself.
The Marshal de Retz smiled, if indeed the contraction of muscles which revealed a line of white teeth can be called by that name. In the sense in which Astarte would have smiled upon a defenceless sheepfold, so Gilles de Retz might have been said to smile at his visitor.