the terrible count.

"No, he will not kill us!" she cried to herself mentally, after
contemplating her husband for a long time. "He is frank, courageous,
faithful to his word--faithful to his word!"

Repeating that last sentence in her thoughts, she trembled violently,
and remained as if stupefied.

To understand the horror of her present situation, we must add that
this nocturnal scene took place in 1591, a period when civil war raged
throughout France, and the laws had no vigor. The excesses of the
League, opposed to the accession of Henri IV., surpassed the
calamities of the religious wars. License was so universal that no one
was surprised to see a great lord kill his enemy in open day. When a
military expedition, having a private object, was led in the name of
the King or of the League, one or other of these parties applauded it.
It was thus that Blagny, a soldier, came near becoming a sovereign
prince at the gates of France. Sometime before Henri III.'s death, a
court lady murdered a nobleman who made offensive remarks about her.
One of the king's minions remarked to him:--

"Hey! vive Dieu! sire, she daggered him finely!"

The Comte d'Herouville, one of the most rabid royalists in Normandy,
kept the part of that province which adjoins Brittany under subjection
to Henri IV. by the rigor of his executions. The head of one of the
richest families in France, he had considerably increased the revenues
of his great estates by marrying seven months before the night on
which this history begins, Jeanne de Saint-Savin, a young lady who, by