He was as glad to be gone as she was to go.  The group by the doorway parted; she passed through it, he followed.  In a moment the two stood in the great gallery, above the Salle des Caryatides.  The crowd which had paraded here an hour before was gone, and the vast echoing apartment, used at that date as a guard-room, was well-nigh empty.  Only at rare intervals, in the embrasure of a window or the recess of a door, a couple talked softly.  At the farther end, near the head of the staircase which led to the hall below, and the courtyard, a group of armed Swiss lounged on guard.  Mademoiselle shot a keen glance up and down, then she turned to her lover, her face hot with indignation.

“Why did you leave me?” she asked.  “Why did you leave me, if you could not come back at once?  Do you understand, sir,” she continued, “that it was at your instance I came to Paris, that I came to this Court, and that I look to you for protection?”

“Surely,” he said.  “And—­”

“And do you think Carlat and his wife fit guardians for me?  Should I have come or thought of coming to this wedding, but for your promise, and Madame your cousin’s?  If I had not deemed myself almost your wife,” she continued warmly, “and secure of your protection, should I have come within a hundred miles of this dreadful city?  To which, had I my will, none of our people should have come.”

“Dreadful?  Pardieu, not so dreadful,” he answered, smiling, and striving to give the dispute a playful turn.  “You have seen more in a week than you would have seen at Vrillac in a lifetime, Mademoiselle.”

“And I choke!” she retorted; “I choke!  Do you not see how they look at us, at us Huguenots, in the street?  How they, who live here, point at us and curse us?  How the very dogs scent us out and snarl at our heels, and the babes cross themselves when we go by?  Can you see the Place des Gastines and not think what stood there?  Can you pass the Greve at night and not fill the air above the river with screams and wailings and horrible cries—­the cries of our people murdered on that spot?” She paused for breath, recovered herself a little, and in a lower tone, “For me,” she said, “I think of Philippa de Luns by day and by night!  The eaves are a threat to me; the tiles would fall on us had they their will; the houses nod to—­to—­”

“To what, Mademoiselle?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders and assuming a tone of cynicism.

“To crush us!  Yes, Monsieur, to crush us!”

“And all this because I left you for a moment?”

“For an hour—­or well-nigh an hour,” she answered more soberly.

“But if I could not help it?”

“You should have thought of that—­before you brought me to Paris, Monsieur.  In these troublous times.”

He coloured warmly.  “You are unjust, Mademoiselle,” he said.  “There are things you forget; in a Court one is not always master of one’s self.”