id Claire, "that no man can be a coward who ventures
himself with an angry treacherous king as freely as in his own house."

"Ah"--the Princess smiled scornfully--"our cousin Guise does not lack
courage of the insolent sort. Witness how on the day of the Barricades
he extended his kind protection to King Henry III. of Valois in his own
city of Paris, where he had dwelt fourteen years. Nay, he even rode in
from Soissons that he might do it!"

"You do not love my Lord of Guise?" said Claire. "Yet my father used to
call him the best Huguenot in France, and swear that neither Rosny, nor
D'Aubigne, nor yet he himself did one half so much service to the
Bearnais as the Duke of Guise!"

The King's sister pondered a while upon this.

"That is perhaps true," she said at last; "Guise is vain, and
venturesome because he is vain. He cannot do without shouting crowds,
and hands held out to him by every scavenger and pewterer's
apprentice--'Guise--the good Guise!' Pah! The man is no better than a
posturer before a booth at a fair!"

"I have heard almost as much from my father," Claire answered; "he used
to say that Mayenne led the armies, the priests collected the pennies,
and as for Guise, he was only the big man who beat the Leaguers' drum!"

"Your father is dead, they say," murmured the Princess softly; "but in
his time he must have been a man of wit."

"He taught me all I know," Claire assented, "and he died in the service
of the Faith and of the King of Navarre."

"It is strange that I should never have met him," said Catherine. "I
have heard say he was on mission to my brother."

"On secret mission," said Claire; "we came often to the camp by night,
and were gone in the morning."

The Princess looked at her junior in great astonishment.

"Then you have seen camps, and men, and cities?" she asked eagerly.

"And you, courts!" answered Claire, on her part not a little wistfully.

A shudder traversed the slender body of the Princess. Her lip curled
with disgust.

"You speak like a child," she answered hotly. "Why, I tell you, on the
head of my mother, you are safer and better in a camp of German
_reiters_ than in any court in Europe. But I forgot--you, at least, can
pick and choose. You were not born to be only a pawn in the chess-play.
If you do not wish to marry a man, you have only to say him nay. You are
not a princess. I would to God I were not!"

"What is the plot against your brother?" said Claire, willing t