“Elizabeth, my daughter, and you, Marguerite, come hither. My sons, Francis and Charles, come to me all of you quickly.” At her invitation they assemble around her in astonishment. “Alas! my children, you are all orphans and I am a widow. I have seen it. It is true. Now, while I speak, the lance is pointed that will pierce the King. Your father must die, my children. I know it and I cannot save him.” While they all press with pitying looks around her, trying to console yet unable to comprehend her meaning, she slowly rises. “Let us, my children,” says she in a hollow voice, “pray for the King’s soul.” She casts herself on the ground and folds her hands in silent prayer. Her children kneel around her. There is a great silence. Then a loud cry is heard from below--“The King is wounded; the King is unhorsed; the King bleeds; _en avant_ to the King!” Catherine rises. She is calm now and perfectly composed. She approaches the wooden steps leading into the arena below. There she sees, stretched on the ground, the King insensible, his face bathed in blood, pierced in the eye by the lance of the masked knight, who has fled. Henry is mortally wounded, and is borne, as the Queen saw in her dream, into a strange chamber in the Palace des Tournelles, hard by. After some days of horrible agony he expires, aged forty-one. The masked knight struck but a random blow, and was held innocent of all malice. He was the Sieur de Montgomeri, ancestor of the present Earls of Eglinton. CHAPTER XI. THE WIDOWED QUEEN. Even while the King lay dying, Catherine gave a taste of her vindictive character by ordering Diane de Poitiers instantly to quit the Louvre; to deliver up the crown jewels; and to make over the possession of the Château of Chenonceau, in Touraine, to herself. Chenonceau was Catherine’s “Naboth’s vineyard.” From a girl, when she had often visited it in company with her father-in-law, Francis, she had longed to possess this lovely woodland palace, beside the clear waters of the river Cher. To her inexpressible disgust, her husband, when he became King, presented it to “the old hag,” Diane, Duchesse de Valentinois. When Diane, sitting lonely at the Louvre, for Henry II. was dying at the Palace des Tournelles received the Queen’s message, she turned indignantly to the messenger and angrily asked, “Is the King then dead?” “No, madame, but his wound is pronounced mortal; he cannot last out the day.” “Tell the Queen,” said Diane haughtily, “that her reign has not yet begun. I am mistress over her and the kingdom as long as the King lives. If he dies I care little how much she insults me. I shall be too wretched even to heed her.”