never, so long as my father retained the spirit that was his, could I return to St. Quentin with the account of my morning's achievements. It was just here that, looking at the business with my father's eyes, I began to have a suspicion that I had behaved like an insolent young fool. But I was still too angry to acknowledge it.

Remained, then, but one course—to stay in Paris, and keep from starvation as best I might.

My thrifty father had not seen fit to furnish me any money to throw away in the follies of the town. He had calculated closely what I should need to take me to Monsieur, with a little margin for accidents; so that, after paying Maître Jacques, I had hardly two pieces to jingle together.

For three years I had browsed my fill in the duke's library; I could write a decent letter both in my own tongue and in Italian, thanks to Father Francesco, Monsieur's Florentine confessor, and handle a sword none so badly, thanks to Monsieur; and I felt that it should not be hard to pick up a livelihood. But how to start about it I had no notion, and finally I made up my mind to go and consult him whom I now called my one friend in Paris, Jacques the innkeeper.

'Twas easier said than done. I had strayed out of the friendly Rue St. Denis into a network of dark and narrow ways that might have been laid out by a wily old stag with the dogs hot on him, so did they twist and turn and double on themselves. I could make my way only at a snail's pace, asking new guidance at every corner. Noon was long past when at length I came on laggard feet around the corner by the Amour de Dieu.

Yet was it not fatigue that weighted my feet, but pride. Though I had resolved to seek out Maître Jacques, still 'twas a hateful thing to enter as suppliant where I had been the patron. I had paid for my breakfast like a lord, but I should have to beg for my dinner. I had bragged of Monsieur's fondness, and I should have to tell how I had been flung under the coach-wheels. My pace slackened to a stop. I could not bring myself to enter the door. I tried to think how to better my story, so to tell it that it should redound to my credit. But my invention stuck in my pate.

As I stood striving to summon up a jaunty demeanour, I found myself gazing straight at the shuttered house, and of a sudden my thoughts shifted back to my vision.

Those murdered Huguenots, dead and gone ere I was born, had appeared to me as plain as the men I passed in the street. Though 

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