said Henry. 'Remember, if you are molested
respecting this matter, that you have here a witness that you did the
part of a gentleman.'

Berenger bowed his thanks, and began something about the honour, but his
eye anxiously followed the circuit on which Eustacie was carried and the
glance was quickly remarked.

'How? Your heart is spinning in that Mahometan paradise, and that is
what put such force into your fists. Which of the houris is it? The
little one with the wistful eyes, who looked so deadly white, and
shrieked out when the devilry overturned you? Eh! Monsieur, you are a
happy man.'

'I should be, Sire;' and Berenger was on the point of confiding the
situation of his affairs to this most engaging of princes, when a fresh
supply of prisoners, chased with wild antics and fiendish yells by the
devils, came headlong in on them; and immediately, completing, as Henry
said, the galimatias of mythology, a pasteboard cloud was propelled
on the stage, and disclosed the deities Mercury and Cupid, who made a
complimentary address to the three princely brothers, inciting them to
claim the nymphs whom their valour had defended, and lead them through
the mazes of a choric celestial dance.

This dance had been the special device of Monsieur and the
ballet-master, and during the last three days the houris had been almost
danced off their legs with rehearsing it morning, noon, and night, but
one at least of them was scarcely in a condition for its performance.
Eustacie, dizzied at the first minute by the whirl of her Elysian
merry-go-round, had immediately after become conscious of that which she
had been too childish to estimate merely in prospect, the exposure to
universal gaze. Strange staring eyes, glaring lights, frightful imps
seemed to wheel round her in an intolerable delirious succession. Her
only refuge was in closing her eyes, but even this could not long be
persevered in, so necessary a part of the pageant was she; and besides,
she had Berenger to look for, Berenger, whom she had foolishly laughed
at for knowing how dreadful it would be. But of course the endeavour to
seek for one object with her eyes made the dizziness even more dreadful;
and when, at length, she beheld him dragged down by the demoniacal
creatures, whose horrors were magnified by her confused senses, and the
next moment she was twirled out of sight, her cry of distracted alarm
was irrepressible. Carried round again and again, on a wheel that to he