"Call me?" he inquired with the air of cheerful readiness to proceed upon any errand, no matter how difficult.
Mr. Madison countered diplomacy with gloom.
"I don't know what to do with you. Why can't you let your sister alone?"
"Has Laura been complaining of me?"
"Oh, Hedrick!" said Mrs. Madison.
Hedrick himself felt the justice of her reproof: his reference to Laura was poor work, he knew. He hung his head and began to scrape the carpet with the side of his shoe.
"Well, what'd Cora say I been doing to her?"
"You know perfectly well what you've been doing," said Mr. Madison sharply.
"Nothing at all; just sitting on the steps. What'd she SAY?"
His father evidently considered it wiser not to repeat the text of accusation. "You know what you did," he said heavily.
"Oho!" Hedrick's eyes became severe, and his sire's evasively shifted from them.
"You keep away from the porch," said the, father, uneasily.
"You mean what I said about Ray Vilas?" asked the boy.
Both parents looked uncomfortable, and Mr. Madison, turning a leaf in his book, gave a mediocre imitation of an austere person resuming his reading after an impertinent interruption.
"That's what you mean," said the boy accusingly. "Ray Vilas!"
"Just you keep away from that porch."
"Because I happened to mention Ray Vilas?" demanded Hedrick.
"You let your sister alone."
"I got a right to know what she said, haven't I?"
There was no response, which appeared to satisfy Hedrick perfectly. Neither parent met his glance; the mother troubled and the father dogged, while the boy rejoiced sternly in some occult triumph. He inflated his scant chest in pomp and hurled at the defeated pair the well-known words:
"I wish she was MY daughter--about five minutes!"
New sounds from without--men's voices in greeting, and a ripple of response from Cora somewhat lacking in enthusiasm--afforded Mr. Madison unmistakable relief, and an errand upon which to send his deadly offspring.
Hedrick, after a reconnaissance in the hall, obeyed at leisure. Closing the library door nonchalantly behind him, he found himself at the foot of a flight of unillumined back stairs, where his manner underwent a swift alteration, for here was an adventure to be gone about with ceremony. "Ventre St. Gris!" he muttered hoarsely, and loosened the long rapier in the shabby sheath at his side. For, with the closing of the door, he had become a Huguenot gentleman, over forty and a little grizzled perhaps, but modest and unassuming; wiry, alert, lightning-quick, with a wrist of steel and a heart of gold; and he was about to ascend the stairs of an unknown house at Blois in total darkness.
He went up, crouching, ready for anything, without a footfall, not even causing a hideous creak; and gained the top in safety.
Here he turned into an obscure passage, and at the end of it beheld, through an open door, a little room in which a dark-eyed lady sat writing in a book by the light of an oil lamp.
The wary Huguenot remained in the shadow and observed her.
Laura was writing in an old ledger she had found in the attic, blank and unused. She had rebound it herself in heavy gray leather; and fitted it with a tiny padlock and key. She wore the key under her dress upon a very thin silver chain round her neck. Upon the first page of the book was written a date, now more than a year past, the month was June--and beneath it:
"Love came to me to-day."
Nothing more was written upon that page.
