iends the dragoons, if later they came to
ride that way. I was separated from those who knew me, and as things now
stood--unless this were, indeed, Lavedan--it might be days before they
found me again.

I was beginning to deplore my folly at having cut myself adrift from
my followers in the first place, and having embroiled myself with the
soldiers in the second; I was beginning to contemplate the wisdom of
seeking some outhouse of this mansion wherein to lie until morning, when
of a sudden a broad shaft of light, coming from one of the windows on
the first floor, fell athwart the courtyard. Instinctively I crouched
back into the shadow of my friendly buttress, and looked up.

That sudden shaft of light resulted from the withdrawal of the curtains
that masked a window. At this window, which opened outward on to a
balcony; I now beheld--and to me it was as the vision of Beatrice may
have been to Dante--the white figure of a woman. The moonlight bathed
her, as in her white robe she leaned upon the parapet gazing upward into
the empyrean. A sweet, delicate face I saw, not endowed, perhaps, with
that exquisite balance and proportion of feature wherein they tell us
beauty lies, but blessed with a wondrously dainty beauty all its own;
a beauty, perhaps, as much of expression as of form; for in that gentle
countenance was mirrored every tender grace of girlhood, all that is
fresh and pure and virginal.

I held my breath, I think, as I stood in ravished contemplation of that
white vision. If this were Lavedan, and that the cold Roxalanne who had
sent my bold Chatellerault back to Paris empty-handed then were my task
a very welcome one.

How little it had weighed with me that I was come to Languedoc to woo a
woman bearing the name of Roxalanne de Lavedan I have already shown. But
here in this same Languedoc I beheld to-night a woman whom it seemed I
might have loved, for not in ten years--not, indeed, in all my life--had
any face so wrought upon me and called to my nature with so strong a
voice.

I gazed at that child, and I thought of the women that I had known--the
bold, bedizened beauties of a Court said to be the first in Europe. And
then it came to me that this was no demoiselle of Lavedan, no demoiselle
at all in fact, for the noblesse of France owned no such faces. Candour
and purity were not to be looked for in the high-bred countenances
of our great families; they were sometimes found in the faces of the
children