‘Did I not belong to you?’ she said exultingly.  ’And had not Sister Monique, yes, and M. le Baron, striven hard to make me good?  Ah, how kind he was!’

’My father?  Yes, Eustacie, he loved you to the last.  He bade me, on his deathbed, give you his own Book of Psalms, and tell you he had always loved and prayed for you.’

’Ah! his Psalms!  I shall love them!  Even at Bellaise, when first we came there, we used to sing them, but the Mother Abbess went out visiting, and when she came back she said they were heretical.  And Soeur Monique would not let me say the texts he taught me, but I WOULD not forget them.  I say them often in my heart.’

‘Then,’ he cried joyfully, ’you will willingly embrace my religion?’

‘Be a Huguenot?’ she said distastefully.

‘I am not precisely a Huguenot; I do not love them,’ he answered hastily; ’but all shall be made clear to you at my home in England.’

‘England!’ she said.  ’Must we live in England?  Away from every one?’

‘Ah, they will love so much!  I shall make you so happy there,’ he answered.  ’There you will see what it is to be true and trustworthy.’

‘I had rather live at Chateau Leurre, or my own Nid de Merle,’ she replied.  ’There I should see Soeur Monique, and my aunt, the Abbess, and we would have the peasants to dance in the castle court.  Oh! if you could but see the orchards at Le Bocage, you would never want to go away.  And we could come now and then to see my dear Queen.

‘I am glad at least you would not live at court.’

’Oh, no, I have been more unhappy here than ever I knew could be borne.’

And a very few words from him drew out all that had happened to her since they parted.  Her father had sent her to Bellaise, a convent founded by the first of the Angevin branch, which was presided over by his sister, and where Diane was also educated.  The good sister Monique had been mistress of the pensionnaires, and had evidently taken much pains to keep her charge innocent and devout.  Diane had been taken to court about two years before, but Eustacie had remained at the convent till some three months since, when she had been appointed maid of honour to the recently-married Queen; and her uncle had fetched her from Anjou, and had informed her at the same time that her young husband had turned Englishman and heretic, and that after a few formalities had been complied with, she would become the wife of her cousin Narcisse.  Now there was no person whom she so much dreaded as Narcisse, and when Berenger spoke of him as a feeble fop, she shuddered as though she knew him to have something of the tiger.