prediction--"it will never be so again in France, Anne!
Never! No man will after this trust another! There will be no honour,
no faith, no quarter, and no peace! And for the Valois who has done
this, the sword will never depart from his house! I believe it! I do
believe it!"

How truly he spoke we know now. For two-and-twenty years after that
twenty-fourth of August, 1572, the sword was scarcely laid aside in
France for a single month. In the streets of Paris, at Arques, and
Coutras, and Ivry, blood flowed like water that the blood of the St.
Bartholomew might be forgotten--that blood which, by the grace of God,
Navarre saw fall from the dice box on the eve of the massacre. The
last of the Valois passed to the vaults of St. Denis: and a greater
king, the first of all Frenchmen, alive or dead, the bravest, gayest,
wisest of the land, succeeded him: yet even he had to fall by the
knife, in a moment most unhappy for his country, before France,
horror-stricken, put away the treachery and evil from her.

Talking with Louis as we rode, it was not unnatural--nay, it was the
natural result of the situation--that I should avoid one subject. Yet
that subject was the uppermost in my thoughts. What were the Vidame's
intentions? What was the meaning of this strange journey? What was to
be Louis' fate? I shrank with good reason from asking him these
questions. There could be so little room for hope, even after that
smile which I had seen Bezers smile, that I dared not dwell upon them.
I should but torture him and myself.

So it was he who first spoke about it. Not at that time, but after
sunset, when the dusk had fallen upon us, and found us still plodding
southward with tired horses; a link outwardly like other links in the
long chain of riders, toiling onwards. Then he said suddenly, "Do you
know whither we are going, Anne?"

I started, and found myself struggling with a strange confusion before
I could reply. "Home," I suggested at random.

"Home? No. And yet nearly home. To Cahors," he answered with an odd
quietude. "Your home, my boy, I shall never see again, Nor Kit! Nor
my own Kit!" It was the first time I had heard him call her by the
fond name we used ourselves. And the pathos in his tone as of the
past, not the present, as of pure memory--I was very thankful that I
could not in the dusk see his face--shook my self-control. I wept.
"Nay, my lad," he went on, speaking softly and leaning from his