nd he regarded us with that smile which--with other
things as evil--had made him famous.

Croisette pulled horrible faces behind his back. We looked hotly at
him; but could find nothing to say.

"You grow red!" he went on, pleasantly--the wretch!--playing with us
as a cat does with mice. "It offends your dignity, perhaps, that I bid
Mademoiselle set you spinning? I now would spin at Mademoiselle's
bidding, and think it happiness!"

"We are not girls!" I blurted out, with the flush and tremor of a
boy's passion. "You had not called my godfather, Anne de Montmorenci a
girl, M. le Vidame!" For though we counted it a joke among ourselves
that we all bore girls' names, we were young enough to be sensitive
about it.

He shrugged his shoulders. And how he dwarfed us all as he stood there
dominating our terrace! "M. de Montmorenci was a man," he said
scornfully. "M. Anne de Caylus is--"

And the villain deliberately turned his great back upon us, taking his
seat on the low wall near Catherine's chair. It was clear even to our
vanity that he did not think us worth another word--that we had passed
absolutely from his mind. Madame Claude came waddling out at the same
moment, Gil carrying a chair behind her. And we--well we slunk away
and sat on the other side of the terrace, whence we could still glower
at the offender.

Yet who were we to glower at him? To this day I shake at the thought
of him. It was not so much his height and bulk, though he was so big
that the clipped pointed fashion of his beard a fashion then new at
court--seemed on him incongruous and effeminate; nor so much the
sinister glance of his grey eyes--he had a slight cast in them; nor the
grim suavity of his manner, and the harsh threatening voice that
permitted of no disguise. It was the sum of these things, the great
brutal presence of the man--that was overpowering--that made the great
falter and the poor crouch. And then his reputation! Though we knew
little of the world's wickedness, all we did know had come to us linked
with his name. We had heard of him as a duellist, as a bully, an
employer of bravos. At Jarnac he had been the last to turn from the
shambles. Men called him cruel and vengeful even for those days--gone
by now, thank God!--and whispered his name when they spoke of
assassinations; saying commonly of him that he would not blench before
a Guise, nor blush before the Virgin.

Such was our visitor and neighbour, Raou