'

The shaft seemed carelessly shot, but Diane knew that it would work, and
so it did. Eustacie wanted to prove her husband's love, not to herself,
but to her cousin.

He made his way to her in the gardens of the Louvre that evening,
greatly dismayed at the report that had reached him that she was to
figure as a nymph of Elysium. She would thus be in sight as a prominent
figure the whole evening, even till an hour so late that the market
boat which Osbert had arranged for their escape could not wait for them
without exciting suspicion, and besides, his delicate English feelings
were revolted at the notion of her forming a part of such a spectacle.
She could not understand his displeasure. If they could not go on
Wednesday, they could go on Saturday; and as to her acting, half the
noblest ladies in the court would be in piece, and if English husbands
did not like it, they must be the tyrants she had always heard of.

'To be a gazing-stock---' began Berenger.

'Hush! Monsieur, I will hear no more, or I shall take care how I put
myself in your power.'

'That has been done for you, sweetheart,' he said, smiling with perhaps
a shade too much superiority; 'you are mine entirely now.'

'That is not kind,' she pouted, almost crying--for between flattery,
excitement, and disappointment she was not like herself that day, and
she was too proud to like to be reminded that she was in any one's
power.

'I thought,' said Berenger, with the gentleness that always made him
manly in dealing with her, 'I thought you like to own yourself mine.'

'Yes, sir, when you are good, and do not try to hector me for what I
cannot avoid.'

Berenger was candid enough to recollect that royal commands did not
brook disobedience, and, being thoroughly enamoured besides of his
little wife, he hastened to make his peace by saying, 'True, _ma mie_,
this cannot be helped. I was a wretch to find fault. Think of it no
more.'

'You forgive me?' she said, softened instantly.

'Forgive you? What for, pretty one? For my forgetting that you are still
a slave to a hateful Court?'

'Ah! then, if you forgive me, let me wear the pearls.'

'The poor pearls,' said Berenger, taken aback for a moment, 'the meed
of our forefather's valour, to form part of the pageant and mummery? But
never mind, sweetheart,' for he could not bear to vex her again: 'you
shall have them to-night: only take care of them. My mother would look
back on me if she knew I had let th