it may be feared that he did not give a very
attentive ear to all this. He did not like to think of those estates;
he would gladly have left them all the Narcisse, so that he might have
their lady, and though quite willing to win his spurs under Charles and
Coligny against the Spaniard, his heart and head were far too full to
take in the web of politics. Sooth to say, the elopement in prospect
seemed to him infinitely more important than Pope or Spaniard, Guise or
Huguenot, and Coligny observed with a sigh to Teligny that he was a good
boy, but nothing but the merest boy, with eyes open only to himself.

When Charles undertook to rehearse their escape with them, and the Queen
drove out in a little high-wheeled litter with Mne. la Comtesse,
while Mme. De Sauve and Eustacie were mounted on gay palfreys with the
pommelled side-saddle lately invented by the Queen-mother, Berenger,
as he watched the fearless horsemanship and graceful bearing of his
newly-won wife, had no speculations to spend on the thoughtful face
of the Admiral. And when at the outskirts of the wood the King's
bewildering hunting-horn--sounding as it were now here, now there, now
low, now high--called every attendant to hasten to its summons, leaving
the young squire and damsel errant with a long winding high-banked lane
before them, they reckoned the dispersion to be all for their sakes, and
did not note, as did Sidney's clear eye, that when the entire company
had come straggling him, it was the King who came up with Mme. De Sauve
almost the last; and a short space after, as if not to appear to have
been with him, appeared the Admiral and his son-in-law.

Sidney also missed one of the Admiral's most trusted attendants, and
from this and other symptoms he formed his conclusions that the King had
scattered his followers as much for the sake of an unobserved conference
with Coligny as for the convenience of the lovers, and that letters had
been dispatched in consequence of that meeting.

Those letters were indeed of a kind to change the face of affairs in
France. Marshal Strozzi, then commanding in the south-west, was bidden
to embark at La Rochelle in the last week of August, to hasten to
the succour of the Prince of Orange against Spain, and letters were
dispatched by Coligny to all the Huguenot partisans bidding them
assemble at Melun on the third of September, when they would be in the
immediate neighbourhood of the court, which was bound for Fontaineb