heart of Lorraine!"

Claire bent her head and nodded sadly.

"Yes," she said, "for my father's sake my mother embroiled herself with
her relatives. She became a Huguenot, a Calvinist like him. Then they
had a family meeting about her. All the black brothers, mailed and
gauntleted, they say, sat round a table and swore that my poor mother
should be no more of their family!"

"Yes, I can fancy it--I see them; there was huge Bernard, weasel-faced
Giles, subtle Philippe----"

"How," cried the girl, surprised in her turn; "you know them--my
mother's people?"

"Well, I ought," said the Professor of the Sorbonne, with a young look
flushing back into his face, "seeing that my mother has held a 'mas'
from the family of Llorient of Collioure for more years than I can
remember. When I was a lad going to the collegiate school at Elne, I
remember your mother, Mademoiselle Colette, as a little maid, playing by
herself among the sand-dunes. I looked up from my Greek grammar to watch
her, till the nurse in the flat Limousin cap shook her fist at me,
stopping her nursing to do it."

Here the Professor seemed to rouse himself as from a dream.

"That rascal John should be getting back by now," he said, "unless he
has elbowed a way into the crowd to fight or fall for his great Duke!"

"You do not love the Duke of Guise?" said the girl.

"I have not your reasons for hating him," the Professor of Eloquence
answered. "I am no Huguenot, by family or feeling. But I think it is a
poor day for France when the valet chases the master out of house and
home. The King is the King, and all the Guises in the world cannot alter
that. Also, since the King has departed, and I have been left, alone
loyal of all the faculty of the Sorbonne, it is time that I too made my
way to see my mother among the sand-hills of Collioure. Ah, John, you
rascal, what has kept you so long?"

"The porter at my uncle's would give me no satisfaction--swore I had
come again to borrow money. A manifest falsehood! As, indeed, I proved
on the spot by pulling him out of his lodge and thumping him well. A
varlet--to dare to suppose, because a gentleman comes twice to borrow
money from a rich and loving relative, that he has returned a third time
upon the same errand! But I got the passports, and they are
countersigned and stamped by Merlan at the Secretary's office, which
will do no harm if we come across King's men!"

"As for the Bearnais and his folk," said the Prof