rs have avenged you. Be
contented with that knowledge, and, for Heaven's sake, do not endeavor
to moralize over the ruin Heaven has made, and justly made, of Queen
Jehane, as I perceive you mean to do." She leaned backward in the
chair, very coarsely clad in brown, but knowing her countenance to be
that of the anemone which naughtily dances above wet earth.

"Friend," the lean-faced man now said, "I do not come with such intent,
as my mission will readily attest, nor to any ruin, as your mirror will
attest. Nay, madame, I come as the emissary of King Henry, now dying
at Vincennes, and with letters to the lords and bishops of his council.
Dying, the man restores to you your liberty and your dower-lands, your
bed and all your movables, and six gowns of such fashion and such color
as you may elect."

Then with hurried speech he told her of five years' events: how within
that period King Henry had conquered entire France, and had married the
French King's daughter, and had begotten a boy who would presently
inherit the united realms of France and England, since in the supreme
hour of triumph King Henry had been stricken with a mortal sickness,
and now lay dying or perhaps already dead, at Vincennes; and how with
his penultimate breath the prostrate conqueror had restored to Queen
Jehane all properties and all honors which she formerly enjoyed.

"I shall once more be Regent," the woman said when he had made an end;
"Antoine, I shall presently be Regent both of France and of England,
since Dame Katharine is but a child." Jehane stood motionless save for
the fine hands that plucked the air. "Mistress of Europe! absolute
mistress, and with an infant ward! now, may God have mercy on my
unfriends, for they will soon perceive great need of it!"

"Yet was mercy ever the prerogative of royal persons," the Vicomte
suavely said, "and the Navarrese we know of was both royal and very
merciful, O Constant Lover."

The speech was as a whip-lash. Abruptly suspicion kindled in her eyes,
as a flame leaps from stick to stick. "Harry of Monmouth feared
neither man nor God. It needed more than any death-bed repentance to
frighten him into restoral of my liberty." There was a silence. "You,
a Frenchman, come as the emissary of King Henry who has devastated
France! are there no English lords, then, left alive of all his army?"

The Vicomte de Montbrison said: "There is perhaps no person better
fitted to patch up this dishonorable