through the glasses which are
held before him. You have nothing to hope from him."

"He spurned me from his presence."

"Did he ask your name?"

"He did, and I gave it."

The young guardsman whistled. "Let us walk to the gate," said he.
"By my faith, if my kinsmen are to come and bandy arguments with the
king, it may not be long before my company finds itself without its
captain."

"The king would not couple us together. But indeed, nephew, it is
strange to me how you can live in this house of Baal and yet bow down to
no false gods."

"I keep my belief in my own heart."

The older man shook his head gravely.

"Your ways lie along a very narrow path," said he, "with temptation and
danger ever at your feet. It is hard for you to walk with the Lord,
Amory, and yet go hand in hand with the persecutors of His people."

"Tut, uncle!" said the young man impatiently. "I am a soldier of the
king's, and I am willing to let the black gown and the white surplice
settle these matters between them. Let me live in honour and die in my
duty, and I am content to wait to know the rest."

"Content, too, to live in palaces, and eat from fine linen," said the
Huguenot bitterly, "when the hands of the wicked are heavy upon your
kinsfolk, and there is a breaking of phials, and a pouring forth of
tribulation, and a wailing and a weeping throughout the land."

"What is amiss, then?" asked the young soldier, who was somewhat
mystified by the scriptural language in use among the French Calvinists
of the day.

"Twenty men of Moab have been quartered upon me, with one Dalbert, their
captain, who has long been a scourge to Israel."

"Captain Claude Dalbert, of the Languedoc Dragoons? I have already some
small score to settle with him."

"Ay, and the scattered remnant has also a score against this murderous
dog and self-seeking Ziphite."

"What has he done, then?"

"His men are over my house like moths in a cloth bale. No place is free
from them. He sits in the room which should be mine, his great boots on
my Spanish leather chairs, his pipe in his mouth, his wine-pot at his
elbow, and his talk a hissing and an abomination. He has beaten old
Pierre of the warehouse."

"Ha!"

"And thrust me into the cellar."

"Ha!"

"Because I have dragged him back when in his drunken love he would have
thrown his arms about your cousin Adele."

"Oh!" The young man's colour had been rising and his brows knitted at
each successi