the
point of inditing a letter to Her Majesty. The office of Seneschal in
a province such as Dauphiny is helas!--no sinecure." He sighed like
one whose brain is weary. "It leaves a man little time even to eat or
sleep."

"You will be needing a holiday, then," said she, with cool insolence.
"Take one for once, and let the King's business give place for half an
hour to mine."

The secretary's horror grew by leaps and bounds.

Surely the storm would burst at last about this audacious woman's head.
But the Lord Seneschal--usually so fiery and tempestuous--did no more
than make her another of his absurd bows.

"You anticipate, madame, the very words I was about to utter. Babylas,
vanish!" And he waved the scribbler doorwards with a contemptuous hand.
"Take your papers with you--into my closet there. We will resume that
letter to Her Majesty when madame shall have left me."

The secretary gathered up his papers, his quills, and his inkhorn, and
went his way, accounting the end of the world at hand.

When the door had closed upon him, the Seneschal, with another bow and
a simper, placed a chair at his visitor's disposal. She looked at the
chair, then looked at the man much as she had looked at the chair,
and turning her back contemptuously on both, she sauntered towards the
fireplace. She stood before the blaze, with her whip tucked under her
arm, drawing off her stout riding-gloves. She was a tall, splendidly
proportioned woman, of a superb beauty of countenance, for all that she
was well past the spring of life.

In the waning light of that October afternoon none would have guessed
her age to be so much as thirty, though in the sunlight you might have
set it at a little more. But in no light at all would you have guessed
the truth, that her next would be her forty-second birthday. Her face
was pale, of an ivory pallor that gleamed in sharp contrast with the
ebony of her lustrous hair. Under the long lashes of low lids a pair of
eyes black and insolent set off the haughty lines of her scarlet lips.
Her nose was thin and straight, her neck an ivory pillar splendidly
upright upon her handsome shoulders.

She was dressed for riding, in a gown of sapphire velvet, handsomely
laced in gold across the stomacher, and surmounted at the neck, where
it was cut low and square, by the starched band of fine linen which in
France was already replacing the more elaborate ruff. On her head, over
a linen coif, she wore a tall-crowned