That Humphrey West should find sleep again after overhearing this conversation was scarcely probable. In listening to it, in being forced to listen to that conversation when once awakened by it, he had indeed become possessed of strange knowledge.
He had become possessed, firstly, of the knowledge that some other woman than the Duchess admired De Beaurepaire, namely, the woman who had been in that next room but a short time before, and not the one who was in the next room on the other side; not the woman whom the Prince had seen safely through the gates of Paris when escaping from her cruel husband's house.
That alone was startling, since, if De Beaurepaire did not love the Duchesse de Castellucchio, why and wherefore had he jeopardised his own great position in helping her in such an attempt! Humphrey West knew well enough the power, often enough exerted, against those who assisted women of position, girls who were wealthy heiresses, or wards of _La Grande Chambre_, by _La Grande Chambre_ itself. Were there not men detained in the Bastille, in Vincennes, in Bicêtre at this very moment, ay, even in far off Pignerol, for similar actions, while in their case they had, or pretended to have, the one great, the one supreme excuse that they loved the women whom they had assisted in evading their lawful custodians. Yet, he told himself, this excuse was not available by De Beaurepaire. For here, next to his own room, but a little while ago, was a woman whom La Truaumont had spoken of as an admirer of his; one who was doubtless admired by him. Here in the very same house, under the very same roof, not forty paces from that other woman!
"What does it mean?" Humphrey asked himself a dozen times. "What? While, strange as it all is, it is nought beside this other strange news. This news that he may be a king. A king! Yet how--and king of what? Of what. Of what other land than France could he, a De Beaurepaire, have dreams of becoming king! And by what means? Ah! great heavens, by what means? In what way but by the most bitter, the blackest treason! By introducing, by helping to introduce, some foreign power into the land to--dethrone the present lawful king! Oh! Oh! it is too awful, too terrible to think upon."