The street below spoke, and from afar, mingling with scattered shots which told the fate of some doomed Swiss, he heard the chorus of the Leaguers' song:
"The Cardinal, and Henry, and Mayenne, Mayenne!
We will fight till all be grey—
Put Valois 'neath our feet to-day,
Deep in his grave the Bearnais—
Our chief has come—the Balafré!"
Abbé John recovered his place, unseen by the Professor. He was pale, his cloak dusty with the wriggling he had done under the benches. He was different also. He had been a furious Leaguer. He had shouted for Guise. He had come up the stairs to seek for weapons wherewith to fight for that Sole Pillar of Holy Church.
"Well?" said Guy Launay, looking sideways at him.
"Well, what?" growled the Abbé John, most unclerically. He had indeed no right to the title, save that his uncle was a cardinal, and he looked to be one himself some day—that is, if the influence of his family held. But in these times credit was such a brittle article.
"Did you get the weapons?" snapped his friend—"the pistol, the sword-cane? You have been long enough about it. I have worn my pencil to a stub!"
The Abbé John had intended to lie. But somehow, when he thought of the clear dark eyes wet with tears, and the dead Huguenot, within there—somehow he could not.
Instead he blurted out the truth.
"I forgot all about them!" he said.
The son of the ex-provost of the merchants looked at him once, furiously.