to Huguenots ears; 'a true friend to this lady must
needs be welcome, above all if he comes in Heaven's name.'

'Sit down and eat, sir,' added Gardon, much more heartily; 'and forgive
us for not having been more hospitable--but the times have taught us to
be cautious, and in that lady we have a precious charge. Rest; for you
look both weary and hungry.'

Eustacie added an invitation, understanding that he would not sit
without her permission, and then, as he dropped into a chair, she
exclaimed, 'Ah! sir, you are faint, but you are famished.'

'It will pass,' he said; 'I have not eaten to-day.'

Instantly a meal was set before him, and ere long he revived; and as
the shutters were closed, and shelter for the night promised to him by a
Huguenot family lodging in the same house, he began to answer Eustacie's
anxious questions, as well as to learn from her in return what had
brought her into her present situation.

Then it was that she recollected that it had been he who, at her cousin
Diane's call, had seized her when she was rushing out of the palace
in her first frenzy of grief, and had carried her back to the women's
apartments.

'It was that day which brought me here,' he said.

And he told how, bred up in his own distant province, by a pious and
excellent tutor, he had devoutly believed in the extreme wickedness of
the Reformers; but in his seclusion he had been trained to such purity
of faith and morals, that, when his brother summoned him to court to
solicit a benefice, he had been appalled at the aspect of vice, and had,
at the same time, been struck by the pure lives of the Huguenots; for
truly, as things then were at the French court, crime seemed to have
arrayed itself on the side of the orthodox party, all virtue on that of
the schismatics.

De Mericour consulted spiritual advisers, who told him that none but
Catholics could be truly holy, and that what he admired were merely
heathen virtues that the devil permitted the Huguenots to display in
order to delude the unwary. With this explanation he had striven to be
satisfied, though eyes unblended by guilt and a pure heart continued to
be revolted at the practices which his Church, scared at the evil
times, and forgetful of her own true strength, left undenounced in her
partisans. And the more that the Huguenot gentlemen thronged the court,
and the young Abbe was thrown into intercourse with them, and the more
he perplexed himself how the truth, the fai