For the flagrant injustice perpetrated on her uncle and cousin in the settlement on Berenger and herself she cared little, thinking they had pretty well repaid themselves, and not entering into Berenger’s deeper view, that this injustice was the more to be deplored as the occasion of their guilt; but she had no doubt or question as to the grand stroke of yielding up her claims on the estate to the Sieur de Bellaise.  The generosity of the deed struck her imagination, and if Berenger would not lead her vassals to battle, she did not want them.  There was no difficulty with Sir Marmaduke; he only vowed that he liked Berenger’s wife all the better for being free of so many yards of French dirt tacked to her petticoat, and Philip hated the remembrance of those red sugar-loaf pinnacles far too much not to wish his brother to be rid of them.

M. de Bellaise, when once he understood that restitution was intended, astonished Sir Marmaduke by launching himself on Berenger’s neck with tears of joy; and Henry of Navarre, though sorry to lose such a partisan as the young Baron, allowed that the Bellaise claims, being those of a Catholic, might serve to keep out some far more dangerous person whom the court party might select in opposition to an outlaw and a Protestant like M. de Ribaumont.

‘So you leave us,’ he said in private to Berenger, to whom he had taken a great liking.  ’I cannot blame you for not casting your lot into such a witch’s caldron as this poor country.  My friends think I dallied at court like Rinaldo in Armida’s garden.  They do not understand that when one hears the name of Bourbon one does not willingly make war with the Crown, still less that the good Calvin left a doctrine bitter to the taste and tough of digestion.  Maybe, since I have been forced to add my spoon to stir the caldron, it may clear itself; if so, you will remember that you have rights in Normandy and Picardy.’

This was the royal farewell.  Henry and his suite departed the next morning, but the Duchess insisted on retaining her other guests till Philip’s cure should be complete.  Meantime, Claude de Mericour had written to his brother and arranged a meeting with him.  He was now no boy who could be coerced, but a staid, self-reliant, scholarly person, with a sword by his side and an English passport to secure him, and his brother did not regard him as quite the disgrace to his family he had at first deemed him.  He was at least no rebel; and though the law seemed to French eyes infinitely beneath the dignity of a scion of nobility, still it was something not to have him a heretic preacher, and to be able at least to speak of him as betrothed to the sister of the Baron de Ribaumont.  Moreover, that Huguenot kinsman, whose extreme Calvinist opinions had so nearly revolted Mericour, had died and left him all his means, as the only Protestant in the family; and the amount, when Claude arranged matters with his brother, proved to be sufficient to bear him through his expenses handsomely as a student, with the hope of marriage so soon as he should have kept his terms at the Temple.