in the destruction of the scorner of her charms—­the foe of her house—­there might have been pride in receiving Queen Catherine’s dexterous hint that she had been an apt pupil, if the young Baron had only been something different—­something less fair, gracious, bright, and pure.  One bright angel seemed to have flitted across her path, and nothing should induce her to believe she had destroyed him.

The stripped corpses of the murdered Huguenots of the palace had been laid in a line on the terrace, and the ladies who had laughed with them the night before went to inspect them in death.  A few remnants of Soeur Monique’s influence would have withheld Diane, but that a frenzy of suspense was growing on her.  She must see for herself.  If it were so, she must secure a fragment of the shining flaxen hair, if only as a token that anything so pure and bright had walked the earth.

She went on the horrible quest, shrinking where others stared.  For it was a pitiless time, and the squadron of the Queen-mother were as lost to womanhood as the fishwomen of two centuries later.  But Diane saw no corpse at once so tall, so young, and so fair, though blond Normans and blue-blooded Franks, lads scarce sixteen and stalwart warriors, lay in one melancholy rank.  She at least bore away the certainly that the English Ribaumont was not there; and if not, he MUST be safe!  She could obtain no further certainty, for she knew that she must not expect to see either her father or brother.  There was a panic throughout the city.  All Paris imagined that the Huguenots were on the point of rising and slaying all the Catholics, and, with the savagery of alarmed cowardice, the citizens and the mob were assisting the armed bands of the Dukes of Anjou and Guise to complete the slaughter, dragging their lodgers from their hiding-places, and denouncing all whom they suspected of reluctance to mass and confession.  But on the Monday, Diane was able to send an urgent message to her father that he must come to speak with her, for Mdlle.  De Nid-de-Merle was extremely ill.  She would meet him in the garden after morning mass.

There accordingly, when she stepped forth pale, rigid, but stately, with her large fan in her hand to serve as a parasol, she met both him and her brother.  She was for a moment sorry, for she had much power over her father, while she was afraid of her brother’s sarcastic tongue and eye; she knew he never scrupled to sting her wherever she was most sensitive, and she would have been able to extract much more from her father in his absence.  France has never been without a tendency to produce the tiger-monkey, or ferocious fop; and the GENUS was in its full ascendancy under the sons of Catherine de Medicis, when the dregs of Francois the First’s PSEUDO-chivalry were not extinct—­when horrible, retaliating civil wars of extermination had made life cheap; nefarious persecutions had hardened the heart and steeled the eye, and the licentiousness promoted by the shifty