ou are there, Suzanne," cried Bellecour. "You see your friend the
secretary there. He has chosen to present himself in a new role to-day.
From being my servant, it seems that he would constitute himself my
murderer."

However unfilial it might be, she could not stifle a certain sympathy
for this young man. She imagined that his rebellion, whatever shape it
had assumed, had been provoked by that weal upon his face; and it seemed
to her then that he had been less than a man had he not attempted to
exact some reparation for the hurt the whip had inflicted at once upon
his body and his soul.

"But what is it that he has done, Monsieur?" she asked, seeking more
than the scant information which so far she had received.

"Enough, at least, to justify my hanging him," answered Bellecour
grimly. "He sought to withstand my authority; he incited the peasants
of Bellecour to withstand it; he has killed Blaise, and he would have
killed me but that I preferred to let him kill my horse."

"In what way did he seek to withstand your authority!" she persisted.

He stared at her, half surprised, half angry.

"What doers the manner of it signify?" he asked impatiently. "Is not the
fact enough? Is it not enough that Blaise is dead, and that I have had a
narrow escape, at his hands?"

"Insolent hound that he is!" put in Madame la Marquise--a fleshly lady
monstrously coiffed. "If we allow such men as thus to live in France our
days are numbered."

"They say that you are going to hang him," said Suzanne, heedless of her
mother's words, and there was the faintest note of horror in her voice.

"They are mistaken. I am not."

"You are not?" cried the Marquise. "But what, then, do you intend to
do?"

"To keep my word, madame," he answered her. "I promised that canaille
that if he ever came within the grounds of Bellecour I would have him
flogged to death. That is what I propose."

"Father," gasped Suzanne, in horror, a horror that was echoed by the
other three or four ladies present. But the Marquise only laughed.

"He will be; richly served," she approved, with a sage nod of her
pumpkin-like head-dress--"most richly served."

A great pity arose now in the heart of Mademoiselle, as her father went
below that he might carry out his barbarous design. She was deaf to
the dainty trifles which the most elegant Chevalier de Jacquelin was
murmuring into her ear. She stood, a tall, queenly figure, at the
balcony's parapet and watched the