and dignified, all the while measuring in her soul the depths of the political abyss which lay before her, like the natural depths which rolled away at her feet.  This day was the second of those terrible days (that of the arrest of the Vidame of Chartres being the first) which she was destined to meet in so great numbers throughout her regal life; it also witnessed her last blunder in the school of power.  Though the sceptre seemed escaping from her hands, she wished to seize it; and she did seize it by a flash of that power of will which was never relaxed by either the disdain of her father-in-law, Francois I., and his court,—­where, in spite of her rank of dauphiness, she had been of no account,—­or the constant repulses of her husband, Henri II., and the terrible opposition of her rival, Diane de Poitiers.  A man would never have fathomed this thwarted queen; but the fair-haired Mary—­so subtle, so clever, so girlish, and already so well-trained—­examined her out of the corners of her eyes as she hummed an Italian air and assumed a careless countenance.  Without being able to guess the storms of repressed ambition which sent the dew of a cold sweat to the forehead of the Florentine, the pretty Scotch girl, with her wilful, piquant face, knew very well that the advancement of her uncle the Duc de Guise to the lieutenant-generalship of the kingdom was filling the queen-mother with inward rage.  Nothing amused her more than to watch her mother-in-law, in whom she saw only an intriguing woman of low birth, always ready to avenge herself.  The face of the one was grave and gloomy, and somewhat terrible, by reason of the livid tones which transform the skin of Italian women to yellow ivory by daylight, though it recovers its dazzling brilliancy under candlelight; the face of the other was fair and fresh and gay.  At sixteen, Mary Stuart’s skin had that exquisite blond whiteness which made her beauty so celebrated.  Her fresh and piquant face, with its pure lines, shone with the roguish mischief of childhood, expressed in the regular eyebrows, the vivacious eyes, and the archness of the pretty mouth.  Already she displayed those feline graces which nothing, not even captivity nor the sight of her dreadful scaffold, could lessen.  The two queens—­one at the dawn, the other in the midsummer of life —­presented at this moment the utmost contrast.  Catherine was an imposing queen, an impenetrable widow, without other passion than that of power.  Mary was a light-hearted, careless bride, making playthings of her triple crowns.  One foreboded great evils,—­foreseeing the assassination of the Guises as the only means of suppressing enemies who were resolved to rise above the Throne and the Parliament; foreseeing also the bloodshed of a long and bitter struggle; while the other little anticipated her own judicial murder.  A sudden and strange reflection calmed the mind of the Italian.

“That sorceress and Ruggiero both declare this reign is coming to an end; my difficulties will not last long,” she thought.