hetic document wherein
she protests her innocence of all offence against the King, and forgives
her enemies specifically--the judge, who prejudiced her case, and
forgot that "the Court should be counsel for the prisoner," and Colonel
Penruddock, "though he told me he could have taken those men before they
came to my house."

Between those lines you may read the true reason why the Lady Alice
Lisle died. She died to slake the cruelly vindictive thirst of King
James II on the one hand, and Colonel Penruddock on the other, against
her husband who had been dead for twenty years.

V. THE NIGHT OF MASSACRE--The Story Of The Saint Bartholomew

There are elements of mystery about the massacre of Saint Bartholomew
over which, presumably, historians will continue to dispute as long as
histories are written. Indeed, it is largely of their disputes that the
mystery is begotten. Broadly speaking, these historians may be divided
into two schools--Catholic and anti-Catholic. The former have made it
their business to show that the massacre was purely a political affair,
having no concern with religion; the latter have been equally at pains
to prove it purely an act of religious persecution having no concern
with politics. Those who adopt the latter point of view insist that
the affair was long premeditated, that it had its source in something
concerted some seven years earlier between Catherine of Medicis and
the sinister Duke of Alva. And they would seem to suggest that Henry of
Navarre, the nominal head of the Protestant party, was brought to Paris
to wed Marguerite de Valois merely so that by this means the Protestant
nobles of the kingdom, coming to the capital for the wedding, should be
lured to their destruction.

It does not lie within the purview of the present narrative to enter
into a consideration of the arguments of the two schools, nor will it be
attempted.

But it may briefly be stated that the truth lies probably in a middle
course of reasoning--that the massacre was political in conception and
religious in execution; or, in other words, that statecraft deliberately
made use of fanaticism as of a tool; that the massacre was brought about
by a sudden determination begotten of opportunity which is but another
word for Chance.

Against the theory of premeditation the following cardinal facts may be
urged:

(a) The impossibility of guarding for seven years a secret that several
must have shared;

(b) The f