any passenger
was abroad at such an hour, as two chimed from the clock overhead.

The women kept together close against the wall to avoid the drip of
the eaves. Lauzun walked up and down like a sentinel, his arms
folded, and talking all the while, though, as before, his utterances
were only an accompaniment to the falling rain and howling wind;
Mary Beatrice was murmuring prayers over the sleeping child, which
she now held in the innermost corner; Anne, with wide-stretched
eyes, was gazing into the light cast beyond the buttress by the fire
on the opposite side, when again there passed across it that form
she had seen on All Saints' Eve--the unmistakable phantom of
Peregrine.

It was gone into the darkness in another second; but a violent start
on her part had given a note of alarm, and brought back the Count,
whose walk had been in the opposite direction.

"What was it? Any spy?"

"Oh no--no--nothing! It was the face of one who is dead," gasped
Anne.

"The poor child's nerve is failing her," said the Queen gently, as
Lauzun drawing his sword burst out--

"If it be a spy it _shall_ be the face of one who is dead;" and he
darted into the road, but returned in a few moments, saying no one
had passed except one of the rowers returning after running up to
the inn to hasten the coach; how could he have been seen from the
church wall? The wheels were heard drawing up at that moment, so
that the only thought was to enter it as quickly as might be in the
same order as before, after which the start was made, along the road
that led through the marshes of Lambeth; and then came the inquiry--
an anxious one--whom or what mademoiselle, as Lauzun called her, had
seen.

"O monsieur!" exclaimed the poor girl in her confusion, her best
French failing, "it was nothing--no living man."

"Can mademoiselle assure me of that? The dead I fear not, the
living I would defy."

"He lives not," said she in an undertone, with a shudder.

"But who is he that mademoiselle can be so certain?" asked the
Frenchman.

"Oh! I know him well enough," said Anne, unable to control her
voice.

"Mademoiselle must explain herself," said M. de Lauzun. "If he be
spirit--or phantom--there is no more to say, but if he be in the
flesh, and a spy--then--" There was a little rattle of his sword.

"Speak, I command," interposed the Queen; "you must satisfy M. le
Comte."

Thus adjured, Anne said in a low voice of horror: "It was a
gentlema