o Italy under the
banner of Brissac; and as for me, my parents yielding to the persuasion
of my mother's uncle, the Bishop of Seez, decided that I should become
a Churchman, and I was forthwith packed off to Paris, and entered at
the College of Cambrai, being then about seventeen years of age. Being
remarkably tall and strongly built, with a natural taste for all manly
exercises, it might have been expected that my books saw little of me;
but, on the contrary, I found in them a pleasure and a companionship
that has lasted through my life. Thus it happened that I made
considerable progress. So much so that the good Bishop, my
great-uncle, often flattered me with the ambitious hopes of some day
filling his Episcopal chair--a hope that, I need not say, was never
realised.

About this time, I being nineteen years of age, things happened that
entirely altered my life. My mother sickened and died. Shortly after
news came of the death of my brother St. Martin, who was killed in an
affair of honour at Milan. The Vidame, my father, then in his
eighty-first year, and much enfeebled by old wounds, especially one he
had received at Fornovo, felt that his last hours were come, and
summoned my brother Simon and myself home to receive his last blessing
before he died.

I hurried back as fast as possible, but when I reached Orrain I found
to my astonishment the gates of the Chateau closed against me, and
Simon, leaning over the battlements, bade me begone.

Overcome with this reception, I was for a space struck speechless; but
at length finding voice I begged, even with tears, to be allowed to see
my father. But Simon sneered back:

"You will have to take a long journey, then; either below or above--I
know not which," he mocked. "Your father is dead. He has left you his
curse, and the lands of St. Martin are yours. I am master here at
last, thank God! And I tell you to be off! Take that pink and white
face of yours back to your College of Cambrai!"

He lied, for, as I afterwards heard, my father was not dead then, but
lay dying in his chamber, to which no one but Simon had access, and
over which he had placed a guard of his men-at-arms, a cut-throat set
of Italians whom he ever had with him.

Simon's cruel words stung me to the quick. My blood flamed with rage,
and I dared him to come forth and meet me as a man; but he only laughed
all the more, and, pointing to the tree of justice outside the gate,
asked how I wou