lumsy salute took the
Jester's beast. Many of the others rose to their feet and made their
reverences according to their kind, clumsy or clever. Others whispered
quietly, passing round the news of his arrival.

For the fool had come to his own. He was no more Jean-aux-Choux, the
King's fool, but Master John Stirling, a Benjamin of the Benjaminites,
and pupil of John Calvin himself.

The white-capped man behind the bar opened carefully a little door, and
as instantly closed it behind Jean.

He pointed up a narrow stair which turned and was lost to sight in the
thickness of the wall.

"You will find them at prayers," he muttered. "He is there."

"Kings are in His hand," responded Jean-aux-Choux, setting a foot on the
first worn step of the narrow stair-case; "the Lord of Battles preserve
him from the curs that yelp about his feet."

There came to Jean a sound of singing--sweet, far away, wistful, a
singing not made for the chanting of choirs or the clamour of organs,
but for folk hiding on housetops, in dens and caves of the earth--soft
singing, with the enemy deadly and near at hand. The burden of their
melody was that thirty-seventh Psalm which once on a time Clement Marot
had risked his life to print.

"Wait on the Lord! Meekly thy burden bear;
Commit to Him thyself and thine affair!
In Him trust thou, and He will bring to pass
All that thou wouldst accomplish and compass.
Thy loss is gain--such is His equity,
Each of His own He guards eternally.
This lesson also learn--
He clasps thee closer as the days grow stern."

Jean opened the door. It was a long, black, oak-ceiled room into which
he looked. There were perhaps a score of Huguenots present, all standing
up, with Marot's little volume of the _Trente Psaumes_ in their hands.
A pastor in Geneva gown and bands stood at a table head, upon which a
few great folios had been heaped to form a rude pulpit.

Beside him, not singing, but holding his psalter with a certain weary
reverence, was a man with a face the best-known in all the world. And
certainly Henry of Navarre never looked handsomer than in the days when
pretty Gabrielle of the house of D'Estrees played with fire, calling her
Huguenot warrior, "His Majesty of the Frosty Beard."

Such a mingling of kindliness, of humour bland and finely tolerant, of
temper quick and high, of glorious angers, of swift, proud sinnings and
repentances as swift, of great eternal d