“I am content,” she muttered faintly.

“And the Lord have mercy on my soul, is what you would add,” he retorted, “so much trust have you in my mercy!  And you are right!  You are right, since you have played this trick on me.  But as you will.  If you will have it so, have it so!  You shall stand on your conditions now; you shall have your pennyweight and full advantage, and the rigour of the pact.  But afterwards—­afterwards, Madame de Tavannes—­”

He did not finish his sentence, for at the first word which granted her petition, Mademoiselle had sunk down on the low wooden window-seat beside which she stood, and, cowering into its farthest corner, her face hidden on her arms, had burst into violent weeping.  Her hair, hastily knotted up in the hurry of the previous night, hung in a thick plait to the curve of her waist; the nape of her neck showed beside it milk-white.  The man stood awhile contemplating her in silence, his gloomy eyes watching the pitiful movement of her shoulders, the convulsive heaving of her figure.  But he did not offer to touch her, and at length he turned about.  First one and then the other of her women quailed and shrank under his gaze; he seemed about to add something.  But he did not speak.  The sentence he had left unfinished, the long look he bent on the weeping girl as he turned from her, spoke more eloquently of the future than a score of orations.

“Afterwards, Madame de Tavannes!”

CHAPTER XII.  IN THE HALL OF THE LOUVRE.

It is a strange thing that love—­or passion, if the sudden fancy for Mademoiselle which had seized Count Hannibal be deemed unworthy of the higher name—­should so entirely possess the souls of those who harbour it that the greatest events and the most astounding catastrophes, even measures which set their mark for all time on a nation, are to them of importance only so far as they affect the pursuit of the fair one.

As Tavannes, after leaving Mademoiselle, rode through the paved lanes, beneath the gabled houses, and under the shadow of the Gothic spires of his day, he saw a score of sights, moving to pity, or wrath, or wonder.  He saw Paris as a city sacked; a slaughter-house, where for a week a masque had moved to stately music; blood on the nailed doors and the close-set window bars; and at the corners of the ways strewn garments, broken weapons, the livid dead in heaps.  But he saw all with eyes which in all and everywhere, among living and dead, sought only Tignonville; Tignonville first, and next a heretic minister, with enough of life in him to do his office.