In an instant the spell is broken. Marguerite extricates herself from the arms of the Duke and rushes forward. It is Charlotte de Presney, disguised like herself in a black domino. “Not a moment is to be lost,” she says, hurriedly. “Her Majesty has three times asked for your highness. She supposes I am in the château seeking you.” Charlotte’s voice is unsteady. She wore her mask to conceal her face, for it was bathed in tears. In an instant she and the Princess, followed by the Duke, cross the terrace to where a boat is moored under the shade of some willows, and are lost in the crowd. The Duke dashes into the darkest recesses of the forest, and is seen no more. CHAPTER XIX. BEFORE THE STORM. Henry, King of Navarre, accompanied by the Prince de Condé and his wife, and attended by eight hundred Huguenot gentlemen dressed in black (for his mother, Queen Jeanne, had died suddenly at Paris, while he was on the road), has just arrived at the Louvre to claim the hand of the Princess Marguerite. The two Princes and the Princesse de Condé are received with royal honours and much effusion of compliments by King Charles and Catherine; they are lodged in the Palace of the Louvre. Whatever Marguerite’s feelings are, she carefully conceals them. Insinuating, adroit, clever, gifted with a facile pen and a flattering tongue, she is too ambitious to resist, too volatile to be constant. She lives in a world of intrigue, as she tells us in her memoirs, and piquing herself on being “so Catholic, so devoted to the ‘sacred faith of her fathers,’ ” and she pendulates between Henri de Guise and La Molle, amid a thousand other flirtations. She lives in a family divided against itself. Sometimes she [Illustration: HENRI DE GUISE. FROM A DRAWING IN THE LOUVRE. (By permission of A. Giraudon, Paris.)] takes part with the Duc d’Anjou and watches the Queen-mother in his interests, in order to report every word she says to him; or she quarrels with D’Anjou and swears eternal friendship with her youngest brother, D’Alençon--all his life the puppet of endless political conspiracies; or she abuses the King (Charles) because he listens to her enemy, De Gaust, and tells her that she shall never marry the Duc de Guise, because she would reveal all the secrets of state to him, and make the House of Lorraine more dangerous than it is already. This greatest princess of Europe, young and beautiful, a “noble mind in a lovely person,” as Brantôme says of her, is agitated, unhappy, and lonely. “Let it never be said,” writes she, “that marriages are made in heaven; God is not so unjust. All yesterday my room echoed with talk of weddings. How can I purge it?”