wounded spirit. Something, however, checked his arm that was about to slip round her--as if Yvonne herself by a mysterious power paralyzed his passion. Yet she made no effort to escape, and under his hand on her plump shoulder he could feel that she, too, was in the grip of strong emotion. His arm dropped to his side.

“Monseigneur will go to the wise soothsayer,” she said very quietly, “for she can help him better than any peasant wench.”

And then André laughed. The gaiety of yesterday had suddenly remastered him. He forgot the shamed sword, the Chevalier, and that infernal court with its smoking torches. Denise should yet be his, and this strange girl his serf.

“Why, then, I will seek this wise woman,” he answered lightly, “before I go to the war. I promise, Yvonne.” And so he left her to her prayers at the tomb of the child who should have been her lord. But she did not pray very long. Indeed, had André cared he might have seen her wrapped in her coarse cloak walking swiftly towards the twinkling lights of the great château, and she sang as she had sung on the back of her spotted cow.

CHAPTER VI
THE WISE WOMAN OF “THE COCK WITH THE SPURS OF GOLD”

IT was a strangely superstitious age this age of Louis XV., strangely superstitious and strangely enlightened. On the one side the illuminated philosophers of the rising school of Voltaire, on the other a society ready to be gulled by every charlatan, quack, or sorceress clever enough to exploit the depths of human credulity. You shall read in the fascinating memoirs of that century how the male and female adventurers tricked to their immense profit that polished, gallant, cynical, and light-hearted noblesse which made the glory of the Court. And André was a true child of his age. Yvonne’s mystifying remarks had stirred all the superstition and awe lurking behind his hollow homage to the established religion, and human curiosity whetted this stimulus of superstition. He scented, in fact, an agreeable adventure in a visit to this mysterious witch.

But first he consulted his friend Henri, Comte de St. Benôit, like himself a Chevau-léger de la Garde, and like himself notorious for his skill with the sword and for his countless gallantries. Was it not St. Benôit who had taken his place in rousing the jealousy of the Comte des Forges and who had also been obliged to give the hot-headed husband the quietus of a flesh-wound?

Henri of course knew all about the wise woman. Was she not the 

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