like, for those harmless forbidden graces towards which she has a
natural aptitude, loses her heart to Gaston as he goes to and fro,
wastes her days in reminiscence of that bright passage, notes the
very fineness of his linen. To him, in turn, she seems, as all
longing creatures ever have done, to have some claim upon him--a
right to consideration--to an effort on his part: he finds a sister
to encourage: she touches him, clings where she touches. The gloomy,
honest, uncompromising Huguenot brothers interfere just in time to
save her from the consequence of what to another than Gaston might
have counted as only a passing fondness to be soon forgotten; and the
marriage almost forced upon him seemed under its actual conditions no
binding sacrament. [126] A marriage really indissoluble in itself,
and for the heart of Colombe sacramental, as he came afterwards to
understand--for his own conscience at the moment, the transaction
seemed to have but the transitoriness, as also the guilt of a vagrant
love. A connexion so light of motive, so inexpressive of what seemed
the leading forces of his character, he might, but for the sorrow
which stained its actual issue, have regarded finally as a mere
mistake, or an unmeaning accident in his career.

Coligni lay suffering in the fiery August from the shot of the
ambiguous assassin which had missed his heart, amid the real or
feigned regrets of the Guises, of the royal family, of his true
friends, wondering as they watched whether the bullet had been a
poisoned one. The other Huguenot leaders had had their warnings to
go home, as the princes of the house of Navarre, Conde and Henry of
Bearn, would fain have done--the gallant world about them being come
just now to have certain suspicious resemblances to a prison or a
trap. Under order of the king the various quarters of Paris had been
distributed for some unrevealed purpose of offence or defence. To