h. I am fair--I should be loved.
Yet I have only served and served and served all my life--ah!"

Suddenly, with a quick under-sob and an outward drive of the palm, as if
to thrust away some hateful thing, she rose to her feet and caught John
d'Albret by the wrist. So lithe was her body that it seemed one single
gesture.

"If I had met you before she did," she whispered fiercely, "would you
have loved me like that? Answer me! Answer me! I command you! It is life
or death, I tell you!"

But the Abbe John, not yet himself, could only stare at her blindly. The
girl's eyes, large and mystic, held him in that dim place, and some of
his pain returned. He covered his face with both hands.

She shook him fiercely.

"Look at me--you are a man," she cried, "say--am I not beautiful? You
have said it already. If you had not met this Huguenot--this daughter of
Geneva, would you have loved me--not as men, ordinary men love, but as
you have loved, with a love strong enough to brave prison, torture, and
death for me--for me?"

The Abbe John, too greatly astonished to answer in words, gazed at the
strange girl. Suddenly the anger dropped, the fierce curves faded from
the lips that had been so haughty. Her eyes were soft and moist with
unshed tears.

Valentine la Nina was pleading with him.

"Say it," she said, "oh, even if it be not true--say it! It would be
such a good lie. It would comfort a torn heart, made ever to do the
thing it hates. If I had been a fisher-girl spreading nets on the sands,
a shepherdess on the hills, some brown sailor-lad or a bearded shepherd
would have loved me for myself. Children would have played about my
door. Like other women, I would have had the sweet bitterness of life on
my lips. I would have sorrowed as others, rejoiced as others. And, when
all was done, turned my face to the wall and died as others, my children
about me, my man's hand in mine. But now--now--I am only poor Valentine
la Nina, the tool of the League, the plaything of politics, the lure of
the Jesuits, a thing to be used when bright, thrown away when rusted,
but loved--never! No, not even by those who use me, and, in using, kill
me!"

And the Abbe John, moved at sight of the pain, answered as best he
might.

"A man can only love as the love comes to him," he murmured. "What might
have been, I do not know. I have thought I loved many, but I never knew
that I loved till I saw little Claire Agnew."

"But if you had not--tell m