voice, addressed apparently to me, caused
me to turn sharply. I found at my elbow a tall thin-faced monk in the
habit of the Jacobin order. He had risen from his seat beside the fire,
and seemed to be labouring under great excitement.

'Who asked how it happened?' he cried, rolling his eyes in a kind of
frenzy, while still observant, or I was much mistaken, of his listeners.
Is there a man in France to whom the tale has not been told? Is there?'

'I will answer for one,' I replied, regarding him with little favour. 'I
have heard nothing.'

'Then you shall! Listen!' he exclaimed, raising his right hand and
brandishing it as though he denounced a person then present. 'Hear my
accusation, made in the name of Mother Church and the saints against
the arch hypocrite, the perjurer and assassin sitting in high places! He
shall be Anathema Maranatha, for he has shed the blood of the holy and
the pure, the chosen of Heaven! He shall go down to the pit, and that
soon. The blood that he has shed shall be required of him, and that
before he is one year older.'

'Tut-tut. All that sounds very fine, good father,' I said, waxing
impatient, and a little scornful; for I saw that he was one of those
wandering and often crazy monks in whom the League found their most
useful emissaries. 'But I should profit more by your gentle words, if I
knew whom you were cursing.'

'The man of blood!' he cried; 'through whom the last but not the least
of God's saints and martyrs entered into glory on the Friday before
Christmas.'

Moved by such profanity, and judging him, notwithstanding the
extravagance of his words and gestures, to be less mad than he seemed,
and at least as much knave as fool, I bade him sternly have done with
his cursing, and proceed to his story if he had one.

He glowered at me for a moment, as though he were minded to launch
his spiritual weapons at my head; but as I returned his glare with an
unmoved eye--and my four rascals, who were as impatient as myself to
learn the news, and had scarce more reverence for a shaven crown, began
to murmur--he thought better of it, and cooling as suddenly as he had
flamed up, lost no more time in satisfying our curiosity.

It would ill become me, however, to set down the extravagant and often
blasphemous harangue in which, styling M. de Guise the martyr of God, he
told the story now so familiar--the story of that dark wintry morning
at Blois, when the king's messenger, knocking early at