‘Master Gardon!’ cried Eustacie.  ’Oh, I know!  O sir, my husband loved and honoured you.’

‘Your husband?’

‘Yes, sir, le Baron de Ribaumont.’

’That fair and godly youth!  My dear old patron’s son!  You—­you!  But—­’ with a shade of doubt, almost of dismay, ’the boy was wedded—­wedded to the heiress—–­’

’Yes, yes, I am that unhappy one!  We were to have fled together on that dreadful night.  He came to meet me to the Louvre—­to his doom!’ she gasped out, nearer to tears than she had ever been since that time, such a novelty was it to her to hear Berenger spoken of in kind or tender terms; and in her warmth of feeling, she came out of her corner, and held our her hand to him.

‘Alas! poor thing!’ said the minister, compassionately, ’Heaven has tried you sorely.  Had I known of your presence here, I would not have entered; but I have been absent long, and stole into my lair here without disturbing the good people below.  Forgive the intrusion, Madame.’

The minister replied warmly that surely persecution was a brotherhood, even had she not been the window of one he had loved and lamented.

‘Ah! sir, it does me good to hear you say so.’

And therewith Eustacie remembered the hospitalities of her loft.  She perceived by the tones of the old man’s voice that he was tired, and probably fasting, and she felt about for the milk and bread with which she had been supplied.  It was a most welcome refreshment, though he only partook sparingly; and while he ate, the two, so strangely met, came to a fuller knowledge of one another’s circumstances.

Master Isaac Gardon had, it appeared, been residing at Paris, in the house of the watchmaker whose daughter had been newly married to his son; but on the fatal eve of St. Bartholomew, he had been sent for to pray with a sick person in another quarter of the city.  The Catholic friends of the invalid were humane, and when the horrors began, not only concealed their kinsman, but almost forcibly shut up the minister in the same cellar with him.  And thus, most reluctantly, had he been spared from the fate that overtook his son and daughter-in-law.  A lone and well-night broken-hearted man, he had been smuggled out of the city, and had since that time been wandering from one to another of the many scattered settlements of Huguenots in the northern part of France, who, being left pastorless, welcomed visits from the minister of their religion, and passed him on from one place to another, as his stay in each began to be suspected by the authorities.  He was now on his way along the west side of France, with no fixed purpose, except so far as, since Heaven had spared his life when all that made it dear had been taken from him, he resigned himself to believe that there was yet some duty left for him to fulfil.