On this day, the bustle among a large number of valets, grooms, cooks and huntsmen who scurried over the court of honor on their way to one or other of the out-buildings, announced that the seigneur of the place was in the castle. Several soldiers dressed in the red uniform, and two sentinels on guard at the foot of the winding staircase, further indicated that the Marquis of Chateauvieux, the colonel of the Crown Regiment, was the guest of the Count of Plouernel, the latter having offered to his friend the colonel to quarter two companies of his soldiers in the numerous dependencies of the castle. Finally, at a distance, stablemen were seen putting some horses through their paces upon the fine grass of a lawn, beyond which, and as far as the eye reached, extended the tree-covered park, dominated to the east by the rocky ridge, at the top of which the imposing ruins and black dungeon of the ancient manor of Plouernel contrasted strikingly against the blue of the sky. The interior of this modern castle corresponded with its sumptuous exterior. Numerous servitors in livery crowded the marble-slabbed vestibule, to the left of which ran a gallery containing the portraits of the Seigneurs Neroweg of Plouernel. The oldest of these paintings, belonging to the Eighth Century, bearing unmistakable mark of Byzantine stiffness of execution, represented a Neroweg lady, Meroflede, the Abbess of Meriadek in Plouernel, of the days of Charles Martel. But seeing that the origin of this family harked back to the conquest of Gaul by the Franks, the father of the present Count, yielding to his pride of race, had supplied the lack of authentic portraits antedating the Eighth Century, by consulting his genealogy, and causing the lineaments of those of his ancestors, who lived during the first five centuries of the Frankish monarchy, to be retraced. Though not accurate portraits of their subjects, these paintings at least reproduced the several costumes of those past epochs. The first Neroweg, a leude of Clovis and count of the country of Auvergne by right of his sword, was represented in all the barbarism of the savage accoutrement of that Frankish warrior--hair of a coppery hue tied at the top of his head with a leather thong, and falling down loose over his back like the tail of a horse; long, red moustaches; clean shaven chin; and savage mien. The bust was half covered by a sort of dalmatica made of an animal's hide, and the warrior leaned his hand upon his "framee," or battle weapon. Among this long succession of portraits was one empty frame wrapped in black crepe. The absent picture was that of Colonel Plouernel, an honorable man, and one of the most valiant captains in the Protestant armies of the Sixteenth Century. But the colonel's great-grandson had struck him out of the family line, meaning thereby to brand in his person the Huguenot, a rebel to his King and to the Church of Rome. The portrait gallery led to a salon, on the other side of which was the