ne; yours by
your womanly grace and mercy--the love she has to give belongs to you
by right of your womanly mercy. Better that I had died in Paris
yesterday than live to repay you as I have!"

But now to the child's mind there seemed to come some gleam of light
as to what was passing between the stranger and her mother; the words,
"Better I had died in Paris," awakened her intelligence.

"Aurelie," she cried, "was this the gentleman whom you hurried to
Paris to save?"

"To save!" St. Georges exclaimed, "to save! My God! do I owe my life
to you as well?"

And Aurelie--her eyes cast down, her frame trembling from head to
foot--murmured: "I could not let you die, knowing what I did, knowing
the evil the De Roquemaures had wrought you. When Monsieur Boussac
sent me word you were doomed, I determined to tell the king all."

* * * * *

So she had saved him! She, whom for four years he had regarded as a
treacherous enemy, had saved not only his child but him. And ere the
day was over he had learned all that she had done besides.

She told her tale to St. Georges and to Boussac as they sat in the
grounds of the old manoir, and made at last all clear to the former
that for so long had been dark and impenetrable.

"The man who was your worst enemy," she said, "was that vile Bishop of
Lodeve; the next was Louvois--for without them my unhappy brother
would have known nothing and could have attempted no harm against you.
He regarded himself as the heir of the Duc de Vannes, and did not know
of your existence until Phelypeaux told him of it. And at the same
time the bishop said that he had another formidable rival in the
Romish Church----"

"The Romish Church!"

"Yes, your father had become converted to it and was received into it
by Phelypeaux himself, the example of Turenne having much influenced
him. At first, on being received, he had, with the fervour of many
converts, bequeathed half of his great fortune to that Church, the
other half remaining a bequest to his heir--my father, and after him
my unhappy half-brother. But, ere he set out on the campaign in which
both he and Turenne were to lose their lives, he wrote to the bishop
and told him that he had a son by an unacknowledged marriage; that he
could not deem it right that he should be deprived of what was
properly his, and that he had made a will leaving all his property to
him. Then the search for you began, though my brother was