h us!"

"It never can go well with us again," St. Renan answered gloomily.
"The king never yields his purpose, he is as tenacious in his hold as
reckless in his promptitude to seize. And they are paid beforehand."

"Paid!" exclaimed the girl, shuddering at the word. "What atrocity!
How paid?"

"How, think you, did your good father earn his title and the rich
governorship of Morlaix? What great deeds were rewarded to La
Rochederrien by his marquisate, and this captaincy of mousquetaires.
You know not yet, young lady, what virtue there is nowadays in being
the accommodating father, or the convenient husband of a beauty!"

"You speak harshly, St. Renan, and bitterly."

"And if I do, have I not cause enough for bitterness and harshness?"
he replied almost angrily.

"Not against me, Raoul."

"I am not bitter against you, Melanie. And yet--and yet--"

"And yet _what_, Raoul?"

"And yet had you resisted three days longer, we might have been
saved--you might have been mine--"

"I am yours, Raoul de St. Renan. Yours, ever and forever! No one's but
only yours."

"You speak but madness--your vow--the sacrament!"

"To the winds with my vow--to the abyss with the fraudful sacrament!"
she cried, almost fiercely. By sin it was obtained and sanctioned--in
sin let it perish. I say--I swear, Raoul, if you will take me, I am
yours."

"Mine? Mine?" cried the young man, half bewildered. "How mine, and
when?"

"Thus," she replied, casting herself upon his breast, and winding her
arms around his neck, and kissing his lips passionately and often.
"Thus, Raoul, thus, and now!"

He returned her embrace fondly once, but the next instant he removed
her almost forcibly from his breast, and held her at arm's length.

"No, no!" he exclaimed, "not thus, not thus! If at all, honestly,
openly, holily, in the face of day! May my soul perish, ere cause come
through me why you should ever blush to show your front aloft among
the purest and the proudest. No, no, not thus, my own Melanie!"

The girl burst into a paroxysm of tears and sobbing, through which she
hardly could contrive to make her interrupted and faultering words
audible.

"If not now," she said at length, "it will never be. For, hear me,
Raoul, and pity me, to-morrow they are about to drag me to Paris."

The lover mused for several moments very deeply, and then replied,
"Listen to me, Melanie. If you are in earnest, if you are true, and
can be firm, there may yet be ha