Do you remember a charming full-length portrait, that we once saw, of Mary and Francis standing in the embrasure of a window of one of the royal palaces? Although a year younger than Mary, Francis had been devoted to her little serene highness of Scotland ever since her early childhood, and she seems to have been equally attached to her boyish lover, as chroniclers of the time tell us that they delighted to retire from the gayety and confusion of the court to whisper their little secrets to each other, with no one to hear, and that they were well content when according to the etiquette of the period they established their separate court and _menage_ at Villers Cotterets as _roi et reine-dauphine_. As the province of Touraine was one of the dower possessions of the young Queen, she entered into her own when she visited these royal castles. We think of her at Amboise, riding up the broad inclines to the royal apartments, her husband by her side, followed by a gay cavalcade, and what would we not give for a momentary glimpse of Mary Stuart in the bright beauty of her youth, before sorrow and crime had cast a shadow over her girlish loveliness! No portrait seems to give any adequate representation of Mary, probably because her grace and animation added so much to the beauty of her auburn tinted hair, the dazzling whiteness of her complexion and the bright, quick glance of her brown eyes. "Others there were," says one of Mary's biographers, "in that gay, licentious court, with faces as fair and forms more perfect; what raised Mary of Scotland above all others was her animation. When she spoke her whole being seemed to become inspired. A ready wit called to its aid a well-stored mind." In fact, Mary was witty enough to afford to be plain, and beautiful enough to afford to be dull; and early and late she captured hearts, from the days when the poets, Ronsard, De Maison Fleur, and the hapless Chastelard, celebrated her charms in verse to a later and sadder time when, during her captivity in England her young page, Anthony Babington, was so fascinated by her wit and grace that he made a valiant and desperate effort to save her to his own undoing. The sorrows and final tragedy of Mary Stuart's life have so overshadowed the events of her early years that we are wont to forget the power and influence that were hers in the eighteen months of her reign as Queen of France. Adored by her young husband, who evidently admired her for her learning as well as for her beauty and charm, she seems to have passed through her years at court with no breath of suspicion attached to her fair name, and this in an atmosphere of unbridled license and debauchery of which Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre, wrote to her son, "No one here but is tainted by it. If you were here yourself you would only escape by some remarkable mercy of God."