The Duke did not answer, but gently drew her near the entrance of the grotto. It was now late, and the lights within had grown dim. “Marguerite,” he says, in a voice trembling with passion, “come where I may adore you as my living goddess—come where I may conjure you to give me a right to defend you. Say but one word, and to-morrow I will ask your hand in marriage; the King dare not refuse me.”
“Alas! my cousin, my mother’s will is absolute.”
“It is a vile conspiracy!” cries the Duke, in great agitation. “The House of Lorraine, my Princess, save but for the Crown, is as great as your own. My uncle, the Cardinal, shall appeal to the Holy See. Marguerite, do but love me, and I will never leave you! Marguerite, hear me!” He seizes her hands—he presses her in his arms, drawing her each moment deeper into the recesses of the grotto. As they disappear, a voice is heard without, calling softly—
“Madame! Madame Marguerite! for the love of heaven, come, come!”
In an instant the spell is broken. Marguerite extricates herself from the arms of the Duke and rushes forward.
It is Charlotte de Presney, disguised like herself in a black domino. “Not a moment is to be lost,” she says, hurriedly. “Her Majesty has three times asked for your highness. She supposes I am in the château seeking you.” Charlotte’s voice is unsteady. She wore her mask to conceal her face, for it was bathed in tears.
In an instant she and the Princess, followed by the Duke, cross the terrace to where a boat is moored under the shade of some willows, and are lost in the crowd.
The Duke dashes into the darkest recesses of the forest, and is seen no more.
CHAPTER XIX.
BEFORE THE STORM.
HENRY, King of Navarre, accompanied by the Prince de Condé and his wife, and attended by eight hundred Huguenot gentlemen dressed in black (for his mother, Queen Jeanne, had died suddenly at Paris, while he was on the road), has just arrived at the Louvre to claim the hand of the Princess Marguerite. The two Princes and the Princesse de Condé are received with royal honours and much effusion of compliments by King Charles and Catherine; they are lodged in the Palace of the Louvre. Whatever Marguerite’s feelings are, she carefully conceals them. Insinuating, adroit, clever, gifted with a facile pen and a flattering tongue, she is too ambitious to resist, too volatile to be constant. She lives in a world of intrigue, as she tells us in her memoirs, and piquing herself on being “so Catholic, so devoted to the ‘sacred faith of her fathers,’ ” and she pendulates between Henri de Guise and La Molle, amid a thousand other flirtations. She lives in a family divided against itself. Sometimes she