give her the form of an
angel and put my soul in the body of a demon?"

Brandilancia, up to this point speechless with astonishment, had not
been able to interrupt her, and the dwarf had climbed to the table,
where, perched at his elbow, she had poured her confidences into his
ear; but as she drew his face to hers with her small claw-like hands he
forgot all considerations of policy in an unconquerable repulsion, and
wrenched himself rudely from her.

"Imp!" he exclaimed, "your soul matches your body. You are hideous
through and through."

The look which she gave him was full of malignity. "You shall live to
learn that the good-will of a devil is better than her ill-will," she
said, as she slipped from the table and left the room.

Brandilancia's uneasy compunction which immediately followed his hasty
exclamation was soon effaced by the dwarf's apparent forgiveness. "We
were both indiscreet," she said to him the following day; "let us forget
and be friends."

But Leonora would not forget, and the young man had lost his
opportunity of making her his friend.

She immediately carried her doubts to her mistress. "The man is not the
Earl of Essex," she asserted. "He is some base impostor, I know not
whom, but I will make him declare himself ere long."

Marie de' Medici was silent, but her thoughts were voluble. Since it had
pleased her royal lover to come incognito she would betray him to no one
nor even allow him to suspect that she had penetrated his disguise, but
would flatter the King by feigning that she loved him for himself alone,
and would exert every endeavour to make him sincerely her lover.

In spite of the injunction of the Grand Duchess, they often spoke of
Henry of Navarre, and Brandilancia in the desire to forward the mission
upon which he had been sent, told of Henry's unhappy wedded life,
expressing with great frankness his own detestation of the craft and
cruelty of Catherine de' Medici and the levity of her daughter
Marguerite of Valois.

"You forget," Marie de' Medici had replied, "that they are my
kinswomen."

"I forget many things in your presence which I should remember," he had
replied. "Sometimes even that I, too, am a married man and, knowing you
as I do, I can not blame the King of France that he is seeking, through
divorce, freedom from a marriage into which he was half tricked, half
forced, and that he is willing to risk salvation for the hope of your
love."

That answer pleased h