"Then we will turn round," replied Beatrice; "and, escorted by kings and princes, make the best of our way through your Majesty's host, till we can sleep in peace a couple of leagues beyond your outposts." "The best plan you can follow," replied the king; "we will not ask you even to pause and refresh yourselves, lest the morals of two such simple boys should get corrupted by the license of our camp. Though here is the Marquis of St. Real, within a hundred yards of us, would doubtless be willing to receive one or both of you into his quarters." Eugenie instinctively shrunk back farther into the corner of the carriage, and the king proceeded; "But we must get you a horse, at all events. Colonel James, send up some of your arquebusiers to that farm-house upon the hill, and see whether in the stables thereof you can find a horse. As your fire has killed one of the beasts which were dragging these two young gentlemen, it is but fit you should take the trouble of providing them with another." The king waited to know if his embassy were successful; and after having seen the soldiers return with a strong cart horse, which was instantly harnessed to the carriage, in the place of the dead one, he gave orders for a party of troopers to escort the young wanderers as far as the Pont de l'Arche; and then, taking his leave, rode on towards his camp. When the carriage was once more in motion, Eugenie breathed again; but still, at every place where it stopped her terrors were renewed, and she gazed out, with alarm and anxiety, upon the dark figures of the soldiery, who watched with unsleeping vigilance in the camp of the warrior monarch, till, at the Pont de l'Arche, which was the advanced post of the king's army, the horse they had obtained was exchanged for another, and they rolled on more smoothly towards the little hamlet of St. Ouen. The fears of Eugenie de Menancourt were during those moments of a very varied kind; for with her terrors so strongly roused as they had been, she found it impossible to submit them entirely to the influence of reason; and yet, strange to say, the thing she dreaded most, after immediate personal danger was over, was to meet and be known by the man whom she now felt, she loved more than any other being upon earth. She shrunk from the thought of seeing St. Real in the garb that she had assumed to escape from the persecution of his cousin,--she shrunk even from the thought of seeing him, now that a ceremony, however vain, illegal, and compulsory, had taken place between her and any other; and though she felt, even to pain, how much she detested the Count d'Aubin, and how much she loved St. Real, yet it seemed to her as if she had wronged her love for him in not dying sooner than suffering even the shadow of an engagement to pass between herself and another. Thus, it was not till they had passed the extreme outpost of the royal camp, and were rolling along in the quiet