in the
dance, and approved of it. She was a beautiful woman, though her
Huguenot gown and close cap now gave her a widowed look--becoming to a
woman of exploits. But she was also the woman to whom he owed one defeat
and much humiliation.

He swept his plume at her feet.

"Permit me, Madame La Tour, to make my compliments to an amazon. My own
taste are women who stay in the house at their prayers, but the Sieur de
la Tour and I differ in many things."

"Doubtless, my lord De Charnisay," responded Marie with the dignity
which cannot taunt, though she still believed the outcast child to be
his. "But why have you closed on us the gates which we opened to you?"

"Madame, I have been deceived in the terms of capitulation."

"My lord, the terms of capitulation were set down plainly and I hold
them signed by your hand."

"But a signature is nothing when gross advantage hath been taken of one
of the parties to a treaty."

The mistake she had made in trusting to the military honor of D'Aulnay
de Charnisay swept through Marie. But she controlled her voice to
inquire,--

"What gross advantage can there be, my lord D'Aulnay--unless you are
about to take a gross advantage of us? We leave you here ten thousand
pounds of the money of England, our plate and jewels and furs, and our
stores except a little food for a journey. We go out poor; yet if our
treaty is kept we shall complain of no gross advantage."

"Look at those men," said D'Aulnay, shaking his glove at her soldiers.

"Those weary and faithful men," said Marie: "I see them."

"You will see them hanged as traitors, madame. I have no time to
parley," exclaimed D'Aulnay. "The terms of capitulation are not
satisfactory to me. I do not feel bound by them. You may take your women
and withdraw when you please, but these men I shall hang."

While he spoke he lifted and shook his hand as if giving a signal, and
the garrison was that instant seized, by his soldiers. Her women
screamed. There was such a struggle in the fort as there had been upon
the wall, except that she herself stood blank in mind, and pulseless.
The actual and the unreal shimmered together. But there stood her
garrison, from Edelwald to Jean le Prince, bound like criminals,
regarding their captors with that baffled and half ashamed look of the
surprised and overpowered. Above the mass of D'Aulnay's busy soldiery
timber uprights were reared, and hammers and spikes set to work on the
likeness of a scaffol