dings of her own
individual father-like leader had opened so much that was new and
precious to her, so full of truth, so full of comfort, giving so much
moral strength, that, unaware that all the foundations had been laid
by Mere Monique, the resolute, high-spirited little thing, out of sheer
constancy and constitutional courage, would have laid down her life as a
Calvinist martyr, in profound ignorance that she was not in the least a
Calvinist all the time.

Hitherto, her wandering life amid the persecuted Huguenots of the West
had prevented her from hearing any preaching but good Isaac's own,
which had been rather in the way of comfort and encouragement than of
controversy, but in this great gathering it was impossible that there
should not be plenty of vehement polemical oratory, such as was sue to
fly over that weary little head. After a specimen or two, the chances
of the sermon being in Provencal, and the necessity of attending to her
child, had been Eustacie's excuse for usually offering to attend to the
_menage_, and set her hostess free to be present at the preachings.

However, Rayonette was considered as no valid excuse; for did not whole
circles of black-eyed children sit on the floor in sleepy stolidity at
the feet of their mothers or nurses, and was it not a mere worldly
folly to pretend that a child of sixteen months could not be brought
to church? It was another instance of the mother's frivolity and the
grandfather's idolatry.

The Moustier, or minster, the monastic church of Montauban, built on
Mont Auriol in honour of St. Theodore, had, twelve years before,
been plundered and sacked by the Calvinists, not only out of zeal for
iconoclasm, but from long-standing hatred and jealousy against the
monks. Catherine de Medicis had, in 1546, carried off two of the jasper
columns from its chief door-way to the Louvre; and, after some years
more, it was entirely destroyed. The grounds of the Auriol Mountain
Monastery have been desolate down to the present day, when they have
been formed into public gardens. When Eustacie walked through them,
carrying her little girl in her arms, a rose in her bosom to console
her for the loss of her bright breast-knot, they were in raw fresh
dreariness, with tottering, blackened cloisters, garden flowers run
wild, images that she had never ceased to regard as sacred lying broken
and defiled among the grass and weeds.

Up the broad path was pacing the municipal procession, he