directness his near relationship warranted, "Gottfried, it would be a great comfort to me if you would take Blanche for your wife."

At this Gottfried blushed up to the roots of his gray hair, and murmured, "What an idea to come into your head--I an old cripple, and this young blossom! It would be a sacrilege!"

"She does not dislike you," said the duke.

The brave Gottfried blushed deeper, and said, "She is but a child."

"Oh, these conscientious notions!" grumbled the exhausted man. But notions or not, Gottfried was firm, and of a marriage-bond with the child would not hear; he promised to afford the little maiden loving care and protection--promised to guard her as the apple of his eye--as his own child, until he could, with confidence, lay her hand into that of a worthy lover's.

And while he promised this, his voice sounded hollow and sad like the tolling of a funeral bell. The duke, with the clear-sightedness of the dying, cast a glance into his brother's heart, and discovered there a holy secret.

"You're an angel, Gottfried," he murmured, "but you make a mistake," and shortly after breathed his last.

On the day of the funeral Dame Isabella von Auberive, a distant relative whom Gottfried, for propriety's sake, had summoned hither, arrived at the castle to share with him in the care of the young girl. Beside her father's bier, surrounded by the dim, flickering candles, he kissed the sweet orphan reverently on the brow, as one kisses the hem of a Madonna's robe; and promised her his loving care. But when she, in a torrent of childish grief, wound her arms about his neck and pressed her little head against his shoulder, he became almost as white as the dead man in his coffin, and tenderly but firmly released himself from her.

It could not be--'twould be sacrilege.

II

During the brilliant period in the reign of King Francis I., it happened that in the marvellously fair, luxuriant Touraine, through whose velvet green meadows ran the "gay-jewel-glistening Loire,--the frolicsome, flippant Loire,"--there arose on its banks, one by one, the stately dwellings of many a proud lord.

Somewhat apart from the others, in a retired spot, where King Francis's elegant hunters seldom found their way, towered up the Castle of Montalme; large, massive, with gloomy little windows sunk into deep holes in the walls, and with a round turret on either wing. Stern and forbidding, it looked down into the moat in whose waterless bed toads and frogs revelled amid the moist green foliage; for the age was fast drawing to a close in which every nobleman had been a little king, and the simple heroic French feudality, blinded by the nimbus of Francis I., were rapidly being transformed into a mere host of courtiers.

The dull uniformity in the architecture of Montalme stood out in striking contrast to the rest of the castles of sunny, pleasure-loving Touraine. The internal arrangement corresponded to the plain exterior, and to the naïve pretensions of a century when, even in Blois and Amboise, the favourite castles of the king, the doors were so low that Francis himself, who is known to have been of regal stature, had to stoop to enter them. The scantiness of the furniture in this huge Castle of Montalme added to its forlorn aspect; nor was the slightest deference paid to prevailing fashion. The ladies wore sombre-coloured dresses, cut high in the neck, and covering the arms down to the very end of the wrists; skirts hanging in long, heavy folds, allowing only the pointed toe of the leather shoe to peep out. The gentlemen wore the hair long, and their faces smoothly shaved; their doublets reached in folds almost to the knees, as had been the fashion under the simple, economical rule of the late king.

* * * * *

A year had glided by since the death of the duke. Blanche enjoyed the happiness of youth, free from care, and Gottfried the peace of honest, high-souled self-denial. A guardian angel, he limped about modestly at the side of his niece, rejoicing to be able to remove every stone which threatened to mar the smoothness of her path, or to scare away the hawks lurking in ambush to surprise her innocence.

And when considering the charms of his dear little niece, Gottfried thought of the orgies in the Amboise Castle, of the "petite bande" and the merry raids of the king, the real aim of which was nothing higher than some foolish love-adventure, he shuddered. Deeply and often he pondered the matter. Blanche was eighteen--it was time for her to be married--and yet his brave, faithful heart shrank with anguish at the bare thought of it. He would not hesitate (at least he believed this of himself) to part with her if only he could find a true-hearted, honourable man. But in this age of beauty and song--the age of King Francis such an one was hard to find.

Meanwhile Blanche was contented with her lonely, monotonous life, perhaps, in part, because she knew no other, yet, also, because a fountain of youthful gaiety was still unexhausted in her heart. There were many things to do in the daytime, and she played chess with her uncle in the long winter evenings, while sparks flashed out of the heavy oak logs in the chimney, and the single tallow candle in its artistically wrought iron candlestick wove a little island of light in the Cimmerian darkness of the monstrous hall.

Sometimes Gottfried entertained her with stories--the legend of Tristran and Iseult--or the pathetic tale of the Count of Lusignano and the fair Melusina; often, too, he told her of his own adventures in foreign lands.

But the happier Blanche made herself in this lonely life, the more furious became Dame Isabella. She was a worthy woman, but never could realise that her once distinguished beauty had long been buried under a weight of corpulence, and therefore did not restrain herself from putting on all sorts of ridiculous airs and graces, in order to attract the attention of the whole neighbourhood to her supposed charms. Out of sheer ennui she ogled even her page, Philemon, a boy of twelve years, although he cherished a modest but so much the more glowing adolescent passion for the lovely Blanche.

Whilst winding endless skeins of silk off the hands of the page, she sighed in a heart-breaking way, and made the most pointed remarks about the laziness and unmannerliness of those noblemen who purposely avoided any approach to the kind, chivalrous king.

Gottfried long forbore to respond to such innuendoes. Of what use would it be to try to explain to this silly old person that the court of King Francis was not the proper sphere for such a fat old woman as herself, or for a little maiden like Blanche, who would receive a kind of adulation before which the good, true-hearted warrior shuddered? Once, however, when Dame Isabella, more excited than usual, stormed in upon him and insisted that the young girl's future should be taken into immediate consideration, he gave her an angry answer. But it did not silence her, and though the worthy woman talked plenty of nonsense, yet she sometimes made a remark that Gottfried could not think wholly unjustifiable. "Blanche is eighteen years old!" stormed Dame Auberive; "if you do not wish her to marry you must resolve to place her in one of the nunneries, which are the only respectable refuge for unmarried women of her position."

"Who told you that I did not want Blanche to marry?" exclaimed Gottfried, with anger and agitation; "it is only that I have not yet found any one good enough for her." But Dame Isabella replied with cutting scorn, "No one will ever seem to you good enough for her!" and bounced out of the room the picture of righteous indignation.