absence were
permitted, it would be only on condition of leaving his son in
the custody of either the Queen-mother or the Count. It had become
impossible to reclaim Eustacie. Her father would at once have pleaded
that she was being bred up in Huguenot errors. All that could be done
was to hasten the departure ere the royal mandate could arrive. A little
Norman sailing vessel was moored two evenings after in a lonely creek on
the coast, and into it stepped M. de Ribaumont, with his Bible, Marot's
Psalter, and Calvin's works, Beranger still tenderly kissing a lock of
Follet's mane, and Madame mourning for the pearls, which her husband
deemed too sacred an heirloom to carry away to a foreign land. Poor
little Eustacie, with her cousin Diane, was in the convent of Bellaise
in Anjou. If any one lamented her absence, it was her father-in-law.

CHAPTER III. THE FAMILY COUNCIL

He counsels a divorce
Shakespeare, KING HENRY VIII.

In the spring of the year 1572, a family council was assembled in Hurst
Walwyn Hall. The scene was a wainscoted oriel chamber closed off by a
screen from the great hall, and fitted on two sides by presses of books,
surmounted the one by a terrestrial, the other by a celestial globe, the
first 'with the addition of the Indies' in very eccentric geography, the
second with enormous stars studding highly grotesque figures, regarded
with great awe by most beholders.

A solid oaken table stood in the midst, laden with books and papers, and
in a corner, near the open hearth, a carved desk, bearing on one slope
the largest copy of the 'Bishops' Bible'; on the other, one of the
Prayer-book. The ornaments of the oaken mantelpiece culminated in a
shield bearing a cross _boutonnee_, i.e. with trefoil terminations. It
was supported between a merman with a whelk shell and a mermaid with a
comb, and another like Siren curled her tail on the top of the gaping
baronial helmet above the shield, while two more upheld the main weight
of the chimney-piece on either side of the glowing wood-fire.

In the seat of honour was an old gentleman, white-haired, and feeble
of limb, but with noble features and a keen, acute eye. This was
Sir William, Baron of Hurst Walwyn, a valiant knight at Guingate and
Boulogne, a statesman of whom Wolsey had been jealous, and a ripe
scholar who had shared the friendship of More and Erasmus. The lady who
sat opposite to him was several years younger, still uprig