He spoke slowly and meditatively, fixing his eyes upon the ground, without once looking in his cousin's face; yet walking with a firm, strong step, and with somewhat of a sneer upon his lip, as if he scoffed at himself for the reprehension which--while he acknowledged wishes that he felt to be wrong--his proud spirit suffered by comparison with the calm, upright integrity of the Chevalier. "I do not see that anything could justify such a step," replied St. Real, far more mildly than the other had expected. "However wrongly the King may have acted, however unwarrantable the manner in which he has put to death the Duke of Guise, yet--" "Pshaw!" interrupted his cousin: "Guise was a traitor--a great, brave, noble, ambitious, unscrupulous traitor! And though the mode of his death was somewhat unceremonious, it little matters whether it was an axe or a dagger which did the work of justice: he was born for such a fate. I thought not of him; it was of Eugenie de Menancourt I thought." "Ha!" exclaimed St. Real, with a start; "no one has injured her?" "Injured her! No, i'faith!" replied the Count. "Why, my good cousin, by your grim look, one would deem you her promised husband, and not me. No, no; had she been injured, her injury had been well avenged by this time. However, she is in the hands of the League. Her father, as you know, was wounded on the day of the barricades, and died soon after the flight of the court. His daughter, of course, would not leave him while he lived, and, at his death, the Duchess of Montpensier would fain have had her at the Hotel de Guise; and, though Eugenie wisely stayed in her father's own house, they would not suffer her to quit Paris, where she still remains--treated with all honour and courtesy, mark you, but still a sort of honourable prisoner." His cousin paused in thought for a moment, and then replied, "But, surely, if you were to demand her from the Duke of Mayenne, informing him of the engagement between her father and yourself, she would be given up to you at once." "I have done more," replied the Count; "whenever I heard of her situation, I required, of course, that she should be placed in the hands of the King, as her lawful guardian, till such time as her marriage with myself could be celebrated. After many an evasion and delay, the Duke replied to my application, that the throne of France was vacant, by a decree both of the Sorbonne and the Parliament of Paris; that, by the same authority, he himself was lieutenant-general of the kingdom till such time as a meeting of the three estates should regulate the government; and that, therefore, none other was for the time the lawful guardian of Eugenie de Menancourt. In the same letter he informed me, that the recent death of the young lady's father would prevent her from thinking of marriage for some time."