veiled. They
were going to church to communicate; and the nuns who conducted them,
thinking, like most of the people, that the preparations were intended to
do honor to some great personage, allowed them to mount upon some large
hewn stones, collected behind the soldiers. There they grouped themselves
with the grace natural to their age, like twenty beautiful statues upon a
single pedestal. One would have taken them for those vestals whom
antiquity invited to the sanguinary shows of the gladiators. They
whispered to each other, looking around them, laughing and blushing
together like children.

The Abbe de Gondi saw with impatience that Olivier was again forgetting
his character of conspirator and his costume of a bricklayer in ogling
these girls, and assuming a mien too elegant, an attitude too refined,
for the position in life he was supposed to occupy. He already began to
approach them, turning his hair with his fingers, when Fontrailles and
Montresor fortunately arrived in the dress of Swiss soldiers. A group of
gentlemen, disguised as sailors, followed them with iron-shod staves in
their hands. There was a paleness on their faces which announced no good.

"Stop here!" said one of them to his suite; "this is the place."

The sombre air and the silence of these spectators contrasted with the
gay and anxious looks of the girls, and their childish exclamations.

"Ah, the fine procession!" they cried; "there are at least five hundred
men with cuirasses and red uniforms, upon fine horses. They've got yellow
feathers in their large hats."

"They are strangers--Catalonians," said a French guard.

"Whom are they conducting here? Ah, here is a fine gilt coach! but
there's no one in it."

"Ah! I see three men on foot; where are they going?"

"To death!" said Fontrailles, in a deep, stern voice which silenced all
around. Nothing was heard but the slow tramp of the horses, which
suddenly stopped, from one of those delays that happen in all
processions. They then beheld a painful and singular spectacle. An old
man with a tonsured head walked with difficulty, sobbing violently,
supported by two young men of interesting and engaging appearance, who
held one of each other's hands behind his bent shoulders, while with the
other each held one of his arms. The one on the left was dressed in
black; he was grave, and his eyes were cast down. The other, much
younger, was attired in a striking dress. A pourpoint of Holland cloth,