litted across her path, and nothing should induce her to believe she
had destroyed him.

The stripped corpses of the murdered Huguenots of the palace had been
laid in a line on the terrace, and the ladies who had laughed with them
the night before went to inspect them in death. A few remnants of Soeur
Monique's influence would have withheld Diane, but that a frenzy of
suspense was growing on her. She must see for herself. If it were so,
she must secure a fragment of the shining flaxen hair, if only as a
token that anything so pure and bright had walked the earth.

She went on the horrible quest, shrinking where others stared. For it
was a pitiless time, and the squadron of the Queen-mother were as lost
to womanhood as the fishwomen of two centuries later. But Diane saw no
corpse at once so tall, so young, and so fair, though blond Normans and
blue-blooded Franks, lads scarce sixteen and stalwart warriors, lay
in one melancholy rank. She at least bore away the certainly that the
English Ribaumont was not there; and if not, he MUST be safe! She could
obtain no further certainty, for she knew that she must not expect to
see either her father or brother. There was a panic throughout the city.
All Paris imagined that the Huguenots were on the point of rising and
slaying all the Catholics, and, with the savagery of alarmed cowardice,
the citizens and the mob were assisting the armed bands of the Dukes of
Anjou and Guise to complete the slaughter, dragging their lodgers
from their hiding-places, and denouncing all whom they suspected of
reluctance to mass and confession. But on the Monday, Diane was able
to send an urgent message to her father that he must come to speak with
her, for Mdlle. De Nid-de-Merle was extremely ill. She would meet him in
the garden after morning mass.

There accordingly, when she stepped forth pale, rigid, but stately, with
her large fan in her hand to serve as a parasol, she met both him and
her brother. She was for a moment sorry, for she had much power over her
father, while she was afraid of her brother's sarcastic tongue and eye;
she knew he never scrupled to sting her wherever she was most sensitive,
and she would have been able to extract much more from her father in
his absence. France has never been without a tendency to produce the
tiger-monkey, or ferocious fop; and the GENUS was in its full ascendancy
under the sons of Catherine de Medicis, when the dregs of Francois the
First's PSEUDO-c