e right! You are right,
since you have played this trick on me. But as you will. If you will
have it so, have it so! You shall stand on your conditions now; you
shall have your pennyweight and full advantage, and the rigour of the
pact. But afterwards--afterwards, Madame de Tavannes--"

He did not finish his sentence, for at the first word which granted her
petition, Mademoiselle had sunk down on the low wooden window-seat beside
which she stood, and, cowering into its farthest corner, her face hidden
on her arms, had burst into violent weeping. Her hair, hastily knotted
up in the hurry of the previous night, hung in a thick plait to the curve
of her waist; the nape of her neck showed beside it milk-white. The man
stood awhile contemplating her in silence, his gloomy eyes watching the
pitiful movement of her shoulders, the convulsive heaving of her figure.
But he did not offer to touch her, and at length he turned about. First
one and then the other of her women quailed and shrank under his gaze; he
seemed about to add something. But he did not speak. The sentence he
had left unfinished, the long look he bent on the weeping girl as he
turned from her, spoke more eloquently of the future than a score of
orations.

"_Afterwards, Madame de Tavannes_!"

CHAPTER XII. IN THE HALL OF THE LOUVRE.

It is a strange thing that love--or passion, if the sudden fancy for
Mademoiselle which had seized Count Hannibal be deemed unworthy of the
higher name--should so entirely possess the souls of those who harbour it
that the greatest events and the most astounding catastrophes, even
measures which set their mark for all time on a nation, are to them of
importance only so far as they affect the pursuit of the fair one.

As Tavannes, after leaving Mademoiselle, rode through the paved lanes,
beneath the gabled houses, and under the shadow of the Gothic spires of
his day, he saw a score of sights, moving to pity, or wrath, or wonder.
He saw Paris as a city sacked; a slaughter-house, where for a week a
masque had moved to stately music; blood on the nailed doors and the
close-set window bars; and at the corners of the ways strewn garments,
broken weapons, the livid dead in heaps. But he saw all with eyes which
in all and everywhere, among living and dead, sought only Tignonville;
Tignonville first, and next a heretic minister, with enough of life in
him to do his office.

Probably it was to this that one man hunted