mate for the old apothecary's daughter," he chuckled.
"After all, our little Margot is _spirituelle_, though she and I do not
get on together."

And setting spurs to his charger, he rode on far ahead of all his
gentlemen to welcome the Queen of Navarre at the bridge-head of
Argenton. There he dismounted, and throwing the reins to the nearest
groom, he walked to the bridle of a lady, who, fair, fresh, and smiling,
came ambling easily up on a white Arab.

It was Marguerite of Valois, his wife, who five years ago had possessed
herself of the strong castle of Usson in Auvergne. Sole daughter of one
king of France, sole sister of three others, and wife of the King of
Navarre, Marguerite of Valois had been a spoiled beauty from her
earliest years. The division of blame is no easy matter, but certainly
the Bearnais was not the right man to tame and keep a butterfly-spirit
like that of "La Reine Margot."

The marriage had been made and finished in the terrible days which
preceded the Saint Bartholomew. The two Queens of France and Navarre had
the business in hand. It had been baptised in torrents of Protestant
blood on that fatal night when the Guise ladies watched at their
windows, while beneath the Leaguers silently bound the white crosses on
their brows. Indeed, from the side of Catherine de Medici, the marriage
of Henry of Navarre and Marguerite of Valois had been arranged with the
single proper intent of bringing Coligny, Conde, and the other great
Huguenots to the shambles prepared for them.

It served its purpose well; but when her mother, Catherine de Medici,
and her royal brothers would gladly have broken off the marriage,
Margot's will was the firmest of any. But though there was little of
good in the life of the Queen Margot, there was ever something good in
her heart.

She refused to be separated from her husband, merely to serve the
intrigues of the Queen-Mother and the Guises.

"Once already I have been sacrificed to your plots," she said. "Because
of that, I have a husband who will never love me. A night of blood
stands between us. Yet will I do nothing against him, because he is my
husband. Nor yet for you, my kinsfolk, because ye paid me away like the
thirty pieces of silver which Judas scattered in the potter's field. I
was the price of blood," so she taunted her mother, "and for that my
husband will never love me!"

No, it was not for that, as history and legend tell all too plainly; but
she was a wo