Then came, he announced, the very cream of the jest, when I was arrested as Lesperon and brought to Toulouse and to trial in Lesperon's stead; he told them how I had been sentenced to death in the other man's place, and he assured them that I would certainly have been beheaded upon the morrow but that news had been borne to him--Rodenard--of my plight, and he was come to deliver me.
My first impulse upon hearing him tell of the wager had been to stride into the room and silence him by my coming.

That I did not obey that impulse was something that presently I was very bitterly to regret.

How it came that I did not I scarcely know.

I was tempted, perhaps, to see how far this henchman whom for years I had trusted was unworthy of that trust.

And so, there in the porch, I stayed until he had ended by telling the company that he was on his way to inform the King--who by great good chance was that day arrived in Toulouse--of the mistake that had been made, and thus obtain my immediate enlargement and earn my undying gratitude.
Again I was on the point of entering to administer a very stern reproof to that talkative rogue, when of a sudden there was a commotion within.
I caught a scraping of chairs, a dropping of voices, and then suddenly I found myself confronted by Roxalanne de Lavedan herself, issuing with a page and a woman in attendance.
For just a second her eyes rested on me, and the light coming through the doorway at her back boldly revealed my countenance.