r murmured
to himself. "Beautiful and a tigress."

At any rate, for the moment, beside herself. "So you have come at last!"
she said, panting, glaring at Felix with scorn, passionate scorn in word
and gesture. "Where were you while these slaves of yours did your
bidding? At the Sorbonne with the black crows! Thinking out fresh work
for them? Or dallying with your Normandy sweetheart?"

"Hush!" he said, lowering his eyes, and visibly quailing before her.
"There is a stranger here."

"There have been many strangers here to-day!" she retorted with
undiminished bitterness. "Hush, you say? Nay, but I will not be silent
for you, for any! They may tear me limb from limb, but I will accuse
them of this murder before God's throne. Coward! Parricide! Do you think
I will ask mercy from them? Come, look on your work! See what the League
have done--your holy League!--while you sat plotting with the black
crows!"

She pointed into the dark room behind her, and the movement disclosed a
younger girl clinging to her skirts, and weeping silently. "Come here,
Susanne," Felix said; he had turned pale and red and shifted from one
foot to another, under the lash of the elder girl's scorn. "Your sister
is not herself. You do no good, Marie, staying in there. See, you are
both trembling with cold."

"With cold?" was the fierce rejoinder. "Then do you warm yourselves! Sit
down and eat and drink and be comfortable and forget him! But I will not
eat nor drink while he hangs there! Shame, Felix Portail! Shame! Have
you arms and hands, and will let your father hang before his own door?"

Her voice rang shrill to the last word audible far down the street; that
said, an awkward silence fell on the room. The stranger nodded twice,
almost as if he said, "Bravo!--Bravo." The two men of the house cast
doubtful glances at one another. At length the clerk spoke. "It is
impossible, mistress," he said gently. "Were he touched, the mob would
wreck the house to-morrow."

"A little bird whispered to me as I came through the streets,"--it was
the stranger who spoke--"that Mayenne and his riders would be in town
to-morrow. Then it seems to me that our friends of the Sorbonne will not
have matters altogether their own way--to wreck or to spare!"

The Sorbonne was the Theological College of Paris; at this time it was
the headquarters of the extreme Leaguers and the Sixteen. Mayenne and
D'Aumale, the Guise princes, more than once found it necessary to check