s to be
their guide for the first stage."

"And wherefore were you selected for such a duty, young gentleman?" said
the lady. "I am told you are the same youth who was lately upon guard in
the gallery in which we met the Princess of France. You seem young
and inexperienced for such a charge--a stranger, too, in France, and
speaking the language as a foreigner."

"I am bound to obey the commands of the King, madam, but am not
qualified to reason on them," answered the young soldier.

"Are you of noble birth?" demanded the same querist.

"I may safely affirm so, madam," replied Quentin.

"And are you not," said the younger lady, addressing him in her turn,
but with a timorous accent, "the same whom I saw when I was called to
wait upon the King at yonder inn?"

Lowering his voice, perhaps from similar feelings of timidity, Quentin
answered in the affirmative.

"Then methinks, my cousin," said the Lady Isabelle, addressing the Lady
Hameline, "we must be safe under this young gentleman's safeguard,
he looks not, at least, like one to whom the execution of a plan
of treacherous cruelty upon two helpless women could be with safety
intrusted."

"On my honour," said Durward, "by the fame of my house, by the bones
of my ancestry, I could not, for France and Scotland laid into one, be
guilty of treachery or cruelty towards you!"

"You speak well, young man," said the Lady Hameline, "but we are
accustomed to hear fair speeches from the King of France and his agents.
It was by these that we were induced, when the protection of the Bishop
of Liege might have been attained with less risk than now, or when we
might have thrown ourselves on that of Winceslaus of Germany, or
of Edward of England, to seek refuge in France. And in what did the
promises of the King result? In an obscure and shameful concealing of
us, under plebeian names, as a sort of prohibited wares in yonder
paltry hostelry, when we--who, as thou knowest, Marthon" (addressing her
domestic), "never put on our head tire save under a canopy, and upon a
dais of three degrees--were compelled to attire ourselves, standing on
the simple floor, as if we had been two milkmaids."

Marthon admitted that her lady spoke a most melancholy truth.

"I would that had been the sorest evil, dear kinswoman," said the Lady
Isabelle, "I could gladly have dispensed with state."

"But not with society," said the elder Countess, "that, my sweet cousin,
was impossible."

"I would