Upon the return of the Professor and Claire from the river-side to the little walled garden and white house of Dame Granier, they found Anthony Arpajon waiting for them. With him was a lady no, a girl of thirty; the expression is right. For through the girlish brightness of her complexion, and in spite of the quick smile that went and came upon her lips, there pierced the sure determination and settled convictions of the adult of a strong race.

“I am Catherine d’Albret and a cousin of your friend,” said the girl; “I have a number of followers brave gentlemen all of them, who have ridden with me from the south. They are lodging with our friend Anthony here. But I am come to abide with you if I may. We shall share the same room and, if you like me, we shall talk the moon across the sky!”

She held out both her hands, but Claire’s shy Scottish blood still held off. The Professor came to their assistance.

“As my lady is a D’Albret,” he said, “she must be a cousin-germain to our good Abbe John!”

The girl smiled, and gave her head a little uplift, half of amusement, half of contempt.

“Ay, truly,” she said, “but we are of different religions. I love not to see a man waste his life on the benches of the Sorbonne; and all for what only to wear a red hat when all is done, like my Uncle of Bourbon!”

The Professor sighed, and thoughtfully rubbed his brow. Then he smiled, as he answered the girl.

“Ah,” he said, “it is always so with you young people. Here am I who have spent the best part of my life on these very Sorbonne benches, teaching Eloquence to a party of young jackanapes who had far better hold their tongues till they have something to say. And for me, no cardinal’s hat at the end of all!”

He sighed a second time, as he added, “Indeed, I know not very well what, after all, is at the end certainly not their monkish dreams of hell, purgatory, paradise!”

The newcomer stepped eagerly forward and laid her hand on his lips. “Hush,” she said, “you have lost your way. You have wandered in your own mazes of subtlety, and arrived nowhere. Now we of the Faith will lead you in the green pastures, beside still but living waters, which your soul shall love!”

The Professor watched the maiden before him a little sadly. Her face was all aglow with enthusiasm. There was a brilliant light in her eyes.

“Yes, I shall teach you I, Catherine of Navarre ”

There was a noise outside on the quay.

She turned towards the window to look out. At the first step, a little halt in her gait betrayed her. The Professor of Eloquence sank on one knee.

“You are Jeanne d’Albret’s own daughter,” he said, “her very self, as I saw her a month before the Bartholomew. Even so she spoke even so she walked. The Bearnais hath no philosophy other than his sword and the ready quip on his tongue. He cares no more for one religion or the other than the white plume he carries in the front of battle. But not so you.”

“Henry of Bourbon-Vendome is my brother,” said Catherine, “all king, all brave man. His faults are not mine nor mine his. I am, as I said, a manifest D’Albret. But Henry holds of Bourbon!”

The two young maids mounted to their chamber. Madame Granier was already there, ordering the bed-linen for the new guest. The girls stood looking a long while into each other’s faces.

“You are prettier than I,” said Mistress Catherine; “but they tell me that, for all that (and it is saying much), your father made you a good daughter of the Religion!”

“He was indeed all of good and brave and in instruction wise I fear me I have profited but little!”

“Ah,” said the Princess, “that is as I would expect your father’s daughter to speak. For the present, I cannot offer you much. I have a great and serious work to do. But one day you shall be my maid-of-honour!”

It is the way of princesses, even of the wisest. But the daughter of Francis the Scot was free-born. She only smiled a little, and answered, with her father’s quiet dignity of manner, “Then or now, I will do anything for the daughter of Queen Jeanne!”

“By-and-by, perhaps, you will be willing to do a little for myself,” said the Princess gently, putting out her arms and taking Claire’s head upon her shoulder. “We shall love one another well, little one.”

The “little one” was at least four inches taller than the speaker, but something must be forgiven to a princess.

Meantime, Madame Granier had arranged all Mistress Catherine’s simple linen and travelling necessities the linen strong, white, and country-spun, smelling of far-off Navarre, bleached on the meadows by the brooks that prattle down from the snows. The brushes and combs were of plain material no gold or silver about them anywhere. Only in a little shagreen case rested a silver spoon, a knife, and a two-pronged fork, with a gilt crown upon each. Otherwise the camp-equipment of a simple soldier of the Bearnais could not have been commoner.

When the hostess had betaken her downstairs, Mistress Catherine drew her new friend down on a low settle, and holding her hand, began to open out her heart gladly, as if she had long wished for a confidante.

“I have come to seek my brother,” she said; “I expected him here in this house. There is a plot to take his life. Guise and D’Epernon both hate him. And, indeed, both have cause. He is too brave for one too subtle for the other. You heard how, at the beginning of this war, he sent messengers to the Duke of Guise saying, ’I am first prince of the blood you also claim the throne. Now, to prevent the spilling of much brave blood, let us two fight it out to the death!’ But Guise merely answered that he had no quarrel with his cousin of Navarre, having only taken up arms to defend from heresy the Catholic faith what a coward!”

“It seems to me,” said Claire, “that no man can be a coward who ventures himself with an angry treacherous king as freely as in his own house.”

“Ah” the Princess smiled scornfully “our cousin Guise does not lack courage of the insolent sort. Witness how on the day of the Barricades he extended his kind protection to King Henry III. of Valois in his own city of Paris, where he had dwelt fourteen years. Nay, he even rode in from Soissons that he might do it!”

“You do not love my Lord of Guise?” said Claire. “Yet my father used to call him the best Huguenot in France, and swear that neither Rosny, nor D’Aubigne, nor yet he himself did one half so much service to the Bearnais as the Duke of Guise!”

The King’s sister pondered a while upon this.

“That is perhaps true,” she said at last; “Guise is vain, and venturesome because he is vain. He cannot do without shouting crowds, and hands held out to him by every scavenger and pewterer’s apprentice ’Guise the good Guise!’ Pah! The man is no better than a posturer before a booth at a fair!”

“I have heard almost as much from my father,” Claire answered; “he used to say that Mayenne led the armies, the priests collected the pennies, and as for Guise, he was only the big man who beat the Leaguers’ drum!”

“Your father is dead, they say,” murmured the Princess softly; “but in his time he must have been a man of wit.”

“He taught me all I know,” Claire assented, “and he died in the service of the Faith and of the King of Navarre.”

“It is strange that I should never have met him,” said Catherine. “I have heard say he was on mission to my brother.”

“On secret mission,” said Claire; “we came often to the camp by night, and were gone in the morning.”

The Princess looked at her junior in great astonishment.

“Then you have seen camps, and men, and cities?” she asked eagerly.

“And you, courts!” answered Claire, on her part not a little wistfully.

A shudder traversed the slender body of the Princess. Her lip curled with disgust.

“You speak like a child,” she answered hotly. “Why, I tell you, on the head of my mother, you are safer and better in a camp of German reiters than in any court in Europe. But I forgot you, at least, can pick and choose. You were not born to be only a pawn in the chess-play. If you do not wish to marry a man, you have only to say him nay. You are not a princess. I would to God I were not!”

“What is the plot against your brother?” said Claire, willing to turn her companion from black ideas; “perhaps I can help. At least, I have with me one who, though they name him ‘fool,’ is yet wiser than all the men I have met, excepting only my father.”

“And they name this marvel what?” demanded the Princess.

“Jean-aux-Choux the Fool of the Three Henries.”

Mistress Catherine clapped her hands almost girlishly, forgetting her accustomed dignity.

“I have seen him,” she cried; “once he came to Nerac, where he pleased the Reine Margot greatly. She is a judge of fools!”

“Our Jean is no fool, really,” said Claire, “but born of my nation, and a learned man, very zealous for the Faith.”

“I know I know,” said the Princess; “I have heard D’Aubigne say of him, that folly made the best cloak for unsafe wisdom. As to the design against the King, it is this. Before the Duke of Guise comes to the Parliament, the Valois will first invite my brother to a conference not here in Blois, but nearer his own lines at Poitiers, perhaps, or at Loches. The Queen-Mother, the Medici woman, though sick and old, has gathered many of her maids-of-honour. She will strive to work upon my easy brother with fair words and fair faces, in the hope that, like Judas, he will betray his Master with a kiss!”

“I had not thought there could be in all the world such women!” said Claire. “After all, our Scottish way is fairer and that is foot to foot and blade to blade!”

“Even the Valois dagger in the back is better,” said the Princess; “but this Italian woman is cunning, like all her fox-brood of Florentine money-lenders! How shall we foil her? It is useless speaking to my brother. He would only laugh, and bid me get to my sampler till he had found a goodman of my own for me to knit hose for!”

“Let me ask counsel of the Doctor of the Sorbonne who is with me,” Claire urged; “he is very wise, and ”

“A Doctor of the Sorbonne!” cried Mistress Catherine “impossible! Why, have they not cursed my brother, excommunicated him? They have even turned against their own King!”

“Ay, but,” said Claire, now eager to do her friend justice, “my Doctor they have excommunicated also, because he withstood them in full Senatus. If he went back to Paris just now, they would hang him in his gown from the windows of his own class-room!”

So in this way Doctor Anatole of the Sorbonne entered into the heretic councils of the Bearnais. Indeed, his was the idea which came like a lightning-flash of illumination upon the councils of Claire and the Princess Catherine.

“What of La Reine Margot?” murmured the Professor, as if he had been speaking to himself; “is she of her husband’s enemies?”

“Nay but,” began the Princess, “that would be pouring oil upon fire!”

“Where one fire has burned, there is little fuel for a second,” suggested the Professor sententiously.

“It is not the highest wisdom,” said the careful Princess, “I fear it would not bring a blessing.”

“It is wisdom if not the highest, my Lady Catherine,” said the learned Doctor, “and if the matter succeeds that, for your Cause, will be blessing enough!”

“Then our Cause is not yours?” Catherine demanded sharply of him. The Professor smiled.

“I am old, or you children think so. I have at least seen the vanity of persecuting any man for the thought that is in his heart. I was bred a Catholic, yet have been persecuted by my brethren for differing from them. But I agree that most honest folk of the realm are of your brother’s party the brave, the wise, the single of eye and heart. There never will be a king in France till the Bearnais reigns.”

The Professor spoke with a certain antique freedom, and the Princess, moved with a sudden impulse, laid her hand on his arm.

“You are with us, then, if not of us?” she said.

“I am of this young lady’s party,” smiled the Professor, turning to Claire, who had been listening quietly. There was a look of great love in his eyes.

“Then I must needs make sure of her!” said the princess, putting her arm about Claire’s waist. “Mistress Claire, vow that you will recruit for our army!”

“Long ago one made me vow that vow!” said Claire. “I am not likely to betray the Cause for which my father died!”

The face of the Princess Catherine grew grave. She was thinking of her own father. Anthony of Bourbon had not made so good an end.

“I vowed my vow night and morning at my mother’s knee,” she said. “Thus it was she bade me promise, in these very words ’As I hope for Christ’s dear mercy, I will live and I will die in the Faith given to the fishermen of Galilee. I will cleave to it, despising all other. Every believer, rich or poor, shall be my brother or my sister they all princes and princesses in Jesus Christ, I only a poor sinner hoping in His mercy!’”

The Professor bowed his head, crossed himself instinctively, and said, “Amen to so good a prayer! At the end, it is ever our mother’s religion which is ours!”