I have the picture before me, with two great towers standing on the wooded hill, with vineyards at the foot, and many a ruined fragment scattered round, showing where the happy and the gay once trod, and commenting silently upon the universal doom. Oh! a ruin is the best _memento mori_, for it tells not the fate of one, but of many generations, and gives to death that universality which most impresses the mind and most prepares the heart. Those buildings were all fresh, and many of them new at the time of which I write. Not a century had passed since the first stone of the whole edifice was laid; and sumptuously furnished, after the fashion of those times, was the great suite of rooms occupying one floor of both those great towers and of the connecting building, now fallen. In one of these rooms was a fine hall, lighted by windows of many-coloured glass, with two oriels or bays penetrating the thick walls and projecting into air, supported by light brackets and corbels of stonework without. The floor of those bays was raised two or three steps above the ordinary level of the hall, and each formed, as it were, a separate room within the room. In one of those bays, just two years after the event which closed the last chapter, sat a tall, powerful man of perhaps thirty-six years of age, dressed in those gorgeous garments of peace which were common to the higher classes in that day. His face was somewhat weather-beaten; there was a scar upon his cheek and on his hand, and the short, curling hair over the forehead had been somewhat worn away by the pressure of the helmet. On the back of the head and on the temples it flowed in unrestrained luxuriance, somewhat grey, indeed, but with the deep brown predominating. At his knee, on a stool of Genoa velvet--it was her favourite seat--was a beautiful girl, seemingly sixteen or seventeen years of age, fair as a snow-drop, with light, flowing hair, and eyes of violet-blue, deep fringed and tender. Her head rested against his side, her arm lay negligently upon his knee, and those blue eyes were turned towards his face with a look of love--nay, almost of adoration. They were De Vitry and Blanche Marie, some two months after their marriage. Her good old grandsire, on his bed of death, had committed her to the guardianship of the King of France, with the request that in two years he would bestow her hand upon the gallant soldier, if she loved him still. Nor had that love for a moment faltered, while, under the care of fair Anne of Brittany, she had passed the allotted time at the court of France; and now she was happy--oh! how supremely blessed with him whose character, without shade or concealment, with all its faults and all its perfections, had stood plain and straightforward from the first.