king out the string of little
yellow shells. 'Dost know them, sweet heart? They have been my chaplet
all this time.'

'Ah!' cried Eustacie, 'poor, good Mademoiselle Noemi! she threaded them
for my child, when she was very little. Ah! could she have given them to
you--could it then not have been true--that horror?'

'Alas! it was too true. I found these shells in the empty cradle, in the
burnt house, and deemed them all I should ever have of my babe.'

'Poor Noemi! poor Noemi! She always longed to be a martyr; but we fled
from her, and the fate we had brought on her. That was the thought that
preyed on my dear father. He grieved so to have left his sheep--and it
was only for my sake. Ah! I have brought evil on all who have been good
to me, beginning with you. You had better cast me off, or I shall bring
yet worse!'

'Let it be so, if we are only together.'

He drew her to him and she laid her head on his shoulder, murmuring,
'Ah! father, father, were you but here to see it. So desolate yesterday,
so ineffably blest today. Oh! I cannot even grieve for him now, save
that he could not just have seen us; yet I think he knew it would be
so.'

'Nay, it may be that he does see us,' said Berenger. 'Would that I had
known who it was whom you were laying down "_en paix et seurte bonne_!"
As it was, the psalm brought precious thoughts of Chateau Leurre, and
the little wife who was wont to sing it with me.'

'Ah!' said Eustacie, 'it was when he sang those words as he was about
to sleep in the ruin of the Temple that first I--cowering there in
terror--knew him for no Templar's ghost, but for a friend. That story
ended my worst desolation. That night he became my father; the next my
child came to me!'

'My precious treasure! Ah! what you must have undergone, and I all
unknowing, capable of nothing wiser than going out of my senses, and
raging in a fever because I could convince no one that those were all
lies about your being aught but my true and loving wife. But tell me,
what brought thee hither to be the tutelary patron, where, but for the
siege, I had over-passed thee on the way to Quinet?'

Then Eustacie told him how the Italian pedlar had stolen her letters,
and attempted to poison her child--the pedlar whom he soon identified
with that wizard who had talked to him of 'Esperance,' until the cue
had evidently been given by the Chevalier. Soon after the Duke had
dispatched a messenger to say that the Chevalier de Ribaum