h I sat. For as
sunshine deepens the shadows which fall athwart it, and no silence is
like that which follows the explosion of a mine, so sadness and poverty
are never more intolerable than when hope and wealth rub elbows with
them.

True, the great sermon which M. d'Amours preached in the market-house
on the morning of Christmas-day cheered me, as it cheered all the more
sober spirits. I was present myself, sitting in an obscure corner of
the building, and heard the famous prediction, which was so soon to be
fulfilled. 'Sire,' said the preacher, turning to the King of Navarre,
and referring, with the boldness that ever characterised that great
man and noble Christian, to the attempt, then being made to exclude the
prince from the succession--'Sire, what God at your birth gave you man
cannot take away. A little while, a little patience, and you shall cause
us to preach beyond the Loire! With you for our Joshua we shall cross
the Jordan, and in the Promised Land the Church shall be set up.'

Words so brave, and so well adapted to encourage the Huguenots in
the crisis through which their affairs were then passing, charmed all
hearers; save indeed, those--and they were few--who, being devoted to
the Vicomte de Turenne, disliked, though they could not controvert, this
public acknowledgment of the King of Navarre, as the Huguenot leader.
The pleasure of those present was evinced in a hundred ways, and to such
an extent that even I returned to my chamber soothed and exalted, and
found, in dreaming of the speedy triumph of the cause, some compensation
for my own ill-fortune.

As the day wore on, however, and the evening brought no change, but
presented to me the same dreary prospect with which morning had made
me familiar, I confess without shame that my heart sank once more,
particularly as I saw that I should be forced in a day or two to sell
either my remaining horse or some part of my equipment as essential;
a step which I could not contemplate without feelings of the utmost
despair. In this state of mind I was adding up by the light of a
solitary candle the few coins I had left, when I heard footsteps
ascending the stairs. I made them out to be the steps of two persons,
and was still lost in conjectures who they might be, when a hand knocked
gently at my door.

Fearing another trick, I did not at once open, the more so there was
something stealthy and insinuating in the knock. Thereupon my visitors
held a whispered c