ed in love-locks to the head. The same
large, dark, wide-pupilled eyes looked each into each as they stood and
gazed across the dead man.

For a moment nothing was said, but the Abbe John recovered himself
first.

"He knows you are here?" he questioned, jerking his thumb over his
shoulder.

"Who?" The girl flung the question back.

"Our Professor of Eloquence, the Doctor Anatole Long?"

"Aye, surely," said the girl; "he it was brought us hither."

He pointed to the dead man.

"Your father?"

The girl put her hand to her breast and sighed a strange piteous
affirmative, yet with a certain reserve in it also.

"What was he, and how came you here?"

She looked at him. He wore the semi-churchly dress of a scholar of the
University. But youth and truth vouched for him, shining from his eyes.
So, at least, she thought. Besides, the girl was in a great perplexity.

"I am Claire," she said, "the daughter of him who was Francis Agnew,
secret agent from the King of Scots to his brother of Navarre!"

"A heretic, then!" He fell back a step. "An agent of the Bearnais!"

The girl said nothing. She had not even heard him. She was bending over
her father and sobbing quietly.

"A Huguenot," muttered the young Leaguer, "an agent of the Accursed!"

He kept on watching her. There was a soft delicate turn of the chin,
childish, almost babyish, which made the heart within him like water.

"Chut!" he said, "what I have now to do is to get rid of that ramping
steer of a Launay out there. He and his blanket-vending father must not
hear of this!"

He went out quietly, sinking noiselessly to the ground behind the arras
of the door, and emerging again, as into another world, amid the hum and
mutter of professorial argument.

"All this," remarked Doctor Anatole, flapping his little green-covered
pulpit with his left hand, "is temporary, passing. The clouds in the sky
are not more fleeting than----"

"Guise! Guise! The good Guise! Our prince has come, and all will now be
well!"

The street below spoke, and from afar, mingling with scattered shots
which told the fate of some doomed Swiss, he heard the chorus of the
Leaguers' song:

"The Cardinal, and Henry, and Mayenne, Mayenne!
We will fight till all be grey--
Put Valois 'neath our feet to-day,
Deep in his grave the Bearnais--
Our chief has come--the Balafre!"

Abbe John recovered his place, unseen by the Professor. He was pale