It was not he whom I wished to scratch—­at least as long as he let me alone—­but M. de Poligny, who took to paying me the most assiduous court wherever I went, for his little schoolboy of a son, till I was almost beside myself with fear that Clement Darpent might believe some false report about me.

And then spring was coming on, and Eustace as yet made no sign of going to Holland.  He only told me to be patient, and patience was becoming absolutely intolerable to my temper.  Meantime, we heard that the First President, Mathieu de Mole, who had some time before been nominated Keeper of the Seals, but had never excised the functions of the office, had nominated M. Darpent to be his principal secretary at Paris, remaining there and undertaking his correspondence when he was with the Court.  Clement had been recommended for this office by his brother-in-law, one of the Gneffiers du Roi, who was always trying to mediate between the parties.  Mole was thoroughly upright and disinterested, and he had begged Clement to undertake the work as the one honest man whom he could trust, and Clement had such an esteem for him that he felt bound to do anything he could to assist him, in his true loyalty.

‘I shall tell the King the truth,’ said the good old man, ’and take the consequences.’

And his being in office gave another hope for better counsels and the States-General.

So Lady Ommaney told me, but I was anxious and dissatisfied.  I had like Clement better when he had refused to purchase an office, and stood aloof from all the suite of the Court.  She soothed me as best she could, and, nodding her head a little, evidently was hatching as scheme.

Now the children had a great desire to see the procession in the Mid-Lent week.  It is after what we call Mothering Sunday—­when the prettiest little boy they can find in Paris rides through the streets on the largest white ox.  Now the lodgings whither Sir Francis and Lady Ommaney had betaken themselves, when my mother had, so to speak, turned them out, had a balcony with an excellent view all along the quais, and thither the dear old lady invited Meg, Madame d’Aubepine, and me, to bring Gaspard, with Maurice and Armantine; and I saw by her face that the bouef gras was not all that there was for me to see.

We went early in the day, when the streets were still not overmuch crowded, and we climbed up, up to the fifth story, where the good old lady contrived to make the single room her means could afford look as dainty as her bower at home, though she swept it with her own delicate white hands.  There was an engraving of the blessed Martyr over the chimmey-piece, the same that is in the Eikon Basilike, with the ray of light coming down into his eye, the heavenly crown awaiting him, the world spurned at his feet, and the weighted palm-tree with Crescit sub pondere virtus.  And Sir Francis’s good old battle-sword and pistols hung under it.  It made me feel quite