‘Eh, father?  At the bidding of those impertinents?’

’Take care, daughter; you were perfect with the tradesfolk and peasants, but you cannot comport yourself as successfully with this petite noblesse, or the pastors’ wives.’

’They are insolent, father.  I, in my own true person, would treat no one as these petty dames treat me,’ said Eustacie.  ’I would not meddle between a peasant woman and her child, nor ask questions that must needs wring her heart.’

’Ah, child! humility is a bitter lesson; and even this world needs it now from you.  We shall have suspicions; and I heard to-day that the King is in Dauphiny, and with him M. de Nid de Merle.  Be not alarmed; he has no force with him, and the peace still subsists; but we must avoid suspicion.  There is a preche at the Moustier to-day, in French; it would be well if you were to attend it.’

‘I understand as little of French sermons as of Provencal,’ murmured Eustacie; but it was only a murmur.

Maitre Gardon had soon found out that his charge had not head enough to be made a thorough-going controversial Calvinist.  Clever, intelligent, and full of resources as she was, she had no capacity for argument, and could not enter into theoretical religion.  Circumstances had driven her from her original Church and alienated her from those who had practiced such personal cruelties on her and hers, but the mould of her mind remained what it had been previously; she clung to the Huguenots because they protected her from those who would have forced an abhorrent marriage on her and snatched her child from her; and, personally, she loved and venerated Isaac Gardon with ardent, self-sacrificing filial love and gratitude, accepted as truth all that came from his lips, read the Scriptures, sang and prayed with him, and obeyed him as dutifully as ever the true Esperance could have done; but, except the merest external objections against the grossest and most palpable popular corruptions and fallacies, she really never entered into the matter.  She had been left too ignorant of her own system to perceive its true clams upon her; and though she could not help preferring High Mass to a Calvinist assembly, and shrinking with instinctive pain and horror at the many profanations she witnessed, the really spiritual leadings of her own individual father-like leader had opened so much that was new and precious to her, so full of truth, so full of comfort, giving so much moral strength, that, unaware that all the foundations had been laid by Mere Monique, the resolute, high-spirited little thing, out of sheer constancy and constitutional courage, would have laid down her life as a Calvinist martyr, in profound ignorance that she was not in the least a Calvinist all the time.