conscience not altogether easy. To have stood by whilst her father
had struck Caron, and moreover, to have done so without any sense of
horror, or even of regret, was a matter in which she asked herself
whether she had done well. Certainly La Boulaye had presumed
unpardonably in speaking to her as he had spoken, and for his
presumption it was fitting that he should be punished. Had she
interfered she must have seemed to sympathise, and thus the lesson
might have suffered in salutariness. And yet Caron La Boulaye was
a man of most excellent exterior, and, when passion had roused him
out of his restraint and awkwardness, of most ardent and eloquent
address. The very sombreness that - be it from his mournful garments
or from a mind of thoughtful habit - seemed to envelop him was but
an additional note of poetry in a personality which struck her now
as eminently poetical. In the seclusion of her own chamber, as she
recalled the burning words and the fall of her father's whip upon
the young man's pale face, she even permitted herself to sigh. Had
he but been of her own station, he had been such a man as she would
have taken pride in being wooed by. As it was - she halted there
and laughed disdainfully, yet with never so faint a note of regret.
It was absurd! She was Mademoiselle de Bellecour, and he her
father's secretary; educated, if you will - aye, and beyond his
station - but a vassal withal, and very humbly born. Yes, it was
absurd, she told herself again: the eagle may not mate with the
sparrow.

And when presently she had come from her chamber, she had been
greeted with the story of a rebellion in the village, and an
attempted assassination of her father. The ringleader, she was
told, had been brought to the Chateau, and he was even then in the
courtyard and about to be hanged by the Marquis. Curious to behold