away across a plain slowly
turning from bright blue-green to dim green-blue in the twilight, we saw
a dream town built of violet shadows--Marie Stuart's dowry town. Its
purple roofs and the dominating towers of its great collegiate church
were ethereal as a mirage, yet delicately clear, and so beautiful,
rising from the river-bank, that I shuddered to think of the French
guns, forced to break the heart of Faidherbe's brave city.

It was a time of day to call back the past, for in the falling dusk
modern things and old things blended lovingly together. For all one
could see of detail, nothing had changed much since the plain of Picardy
was the great Merovingian centre of France, the gateway through which
the English marched, and went away never to return until they came as
friends. Still less had the scene changed since the brave days when
Marguerite de Valois rode through Picardy with her band of lovely ladies
and gallant gentlemen. It was summer when she travelled; but on just
such an evening of blue twilight and silver moonshine might she have had
her pretended carriage accident at Catelet, as an excuse to disappoint
the Bishop of Cambrai, and meet the man best loved of all her lovers,
Duc Henri de Guise. It was just then he had got the wound which gave him
his scar and his nickname of "_Le Balafre_"; and she would have been all
the more anxious not to miss her hero.

I thought of that adventure, because of the picture Brian painted of the
Queen on her journey, the only one of his which has been hung in the
Academy, you know, Padre; and _I_ sat for Marguerite. Not that I'm her
type at all, judging from portraits! However, I fancied myself intensely
in the finished picture, and used to hope I should be recognized when I
strolled into the Academy. But I never was.

Looking down over the plain of Picardy, I pretended to myself that I
could see the Queen's procession: Marguerite (looking as much as
possible like me!) in her gold and crystal coach, lined with
rose-coloured Spanish velvet, jewel-broidered: the gentlemen outriders
trying to stare through the thick panes obscured with designs and
mottoes concerning the sun and its influence upon human fate; the
high-born girls chattering to each other from their embroidered Spanish
saddles, as they rode on white palfreys, trailing after the glittering
coach; and the dust rising like smoke from wheels of jolting chariots
which held the elder women of the Court.

Oh, those