t secrecy.
As a mourner, close beside the bier, knelt the niece of good Dr.
Anatole, the Professor of Eloquence. It was not thought unusual, either
that Doctors of the Sorbonne should have nieces, or that they should be
overcome at the sight of war and dead men. Grave doctors' nieces were
almost proverbially tender-hearted. The Abbe John, a cousin by the
mother's side, and near relative of the great Leaguer Cardinal, ordered,
explained, and comforted, according as he had to do with Sorbonne
servitors, Jesuit fathers, or weeping girls.

He found himself in his element, this Abbe John.

CHAPTER IV.

LITTLE COLETTE OF COLLIOURE

While the Abbe John was gone to seek the passports from his uncle, and
from what remained of royal authority in a city now wholly given over to
the League, Anatole Long, college professor, explained matters to his
new charge.

"You saw but little of your father, I take it?" he began gently. The
Sorbonnist was a large-framed, upstanding man, with an easy-going face,
and manners which could be velvet soft or trampling, according to
circumstances. They were generally the former.

"There is no use in wasting good anger," he would say, "at least, on a
pack of cublings."

He was referring to the young men of his class, who thought themselves
Platos for wisdom and Kings of Navarre in experience. For though they
cursed "the Bearnais" in their songs and causeway-side shoutings, in
their hearts they thought that there was none like him in the world--at
once soldier, lover, and man.

"My father," said Claire Agnew, looking the Professor in the face, "was
a brave gentleman. He owed that to his race. But he had long been in
this service of politics, which makes a man's life like a precious glass
in the hands of a paralytic. One day or another, as he takes his
medicine, it will drop, and there is an end."

"You speak bitterly?"

The Professor's voice was very soft. It was a wonder that he had never
married again, for all knew that his youth had been severely accidented.

"Bitterly," said the girl; "indeed, I may speak truly and yet without
honey under my tongue. For my father made himself a hunted hare for the
cause that was dear to him. Yet the King he served left him often
without a penny or a crust. When he asked for his own, he was put off
with fair words. He spent his own estate, which was all my portion, like
water. Yet neither from King James of Scots, nor from Elizabeth of the
Engl