enemy meted out scant mercy to their foes when opportunity arose? Yet for the moment a lull had fallen on the strife; the attitude of France seemed, for the present, to be quiescent, if not friendly. It was rumoured that the Count Dunois, cousin to the French King, and friend of the Duchess Anne’s, as he had been of her father, was striving to unite the two countries in bonds of peace. Already he had succeeded in bringing about the release of his friend Louis of Orleans, the bitter enemy of the Duchess of Bourbon, and some said the lover of the Duchess of Brittany, for all her tender years, and the fact that he was already the husband of Yeanne, the deformed younger daughter of Louis XI., whom her royal father had forced him to marry. The air was, in fact, thick with rumours and intrigues, with the ominous thunder of war growling threateningly in the distance. It was said that the bond Dunois proposed was the holy one of matrimony between France’s King and Brittany’s Duchess, yet the rumour ran vaguely and doubtfully, and was scarcely credited by those who remembered that Anne was already married by proxy to the King of the Romans, whose little daughter was also affianced, at the tender age of two, to Charles VIII. It was a time, therefore, when men went warily, mistrustfully, with eyes glancing to right and left for fear of enemies, and ears open to listen to the breath of treachery. Above all, on the borders of Brittany was such watchfulness needed. What wonder then if the Sieur de Mereac, riding homewards from the chase with his daughter and kinsman beside him, pondered first on the counsel of one and then of the other, finally deciding that the Frenchman’s fate must be tempered with justice, but small mercy, and that the rope end was the best meed for the enemy of the Duchess Anne? *CHAPTER II*