The battle had been fought yesterday!—Armand de Laguy fell, mortally wounded by his wronged cousin’s hand, and with his latest breath declared his treasons, and implored pardon from his King, his kinsman, and his God—happy to perish by a brave man’s sword not by a headsman’s axe. And Marguerite—the victor’s prize—rejected by the man she had betrayed—herself refusing, even if he were willing, to wed with him whom she could but dishonor—had now no option save death or the detested cloister. And now men pitied—women wept—all frowned and wondered and kept silence. That a young, vain, capricious beauty—the pet and spoiled child from her very cradle of a gay and luxurious court—worshipped for her charms like a second Aphrodite—intoxicated with the love of admiration—that such an one should be inconstant, fickle!—should swerve from her fealty to the dead!—a questionable fealty always!—and be won to a rash second love by the falsehood and treasons of a man, young and brave and handsome—falsehood which had deceived wise men—that such should be the course of events, men said, was neither strange nor monstrous! It was a fault, a lapse of which she had been guilty, which might indeed make her future faith suspected, which would surely justify Charles de La-Hirè in casting back her proffered hand, but which at the worst was venial, and deserving no such doom as the soul-chilling cloister. She had, they said, in no respect participated in the guilt, or shared the treacheries of Armand—on the contrary—she, the victim of his fraud, had been the first to denounce, to spit at, to defy him. Moreover it was understood that although de La-Hirè had refused her hand, several of equal and even higher birth than he had offered to redeem her from the cloister by taking her to wife of their free choice—Jarnac had claimed the beauty—and it was whispered that the Duke de Nevers had sued to Henry vainly for the fair hand of the unwilling novice. But the King was relentless. “Either the wife of De La-Hirè!—or the bride of God in the cloister!” was his unvarying reply. No farther answer would he give—no disclosure of his motives would he make even to his wisest councillors. Some indeed augured that the good monarch’s anger was but feigned, and that deeming her sufficiently punished already he was desirous still of forcing her to be the bride of him to whom she had been destined, and whom she still, despite her brief inconstancy, unquestionably worshipped in her heart. For all men still supposed that at the last Charles would forgive the hapless girl, and so relieve her from the living tomb that even now seemed yawning to enclose her. But others—and they were those who understood the best mood of France’s second Henry—vowed that the wrath was real; and felt, that, though no man could fathom the cause of his stern ire, he never would forgive the guilty girl, whose frailty, as he swore, had caused such strife and bloodshed.