The arms glistened like the stars on summer nights; she knew them well, she read them easily, with their sonorous words, for she was so in the habit of embroidering heraldic symbols. There was Jean V., who stopped from door to door in the town ravaged by the plague, and went in to kiss the lips of the dying, and cured them by saying, “_Si Dieu volt, ie vueil_.” And Felician III, who, forewarned that a severe illness prevented Philippe le Bel from going to Palestine, went there in his place, barefooted and holding a candle in his hand, and for that he had the right of quartering the arms of Jerusalem with his own. Other and yet other histories came to her mind, especially those of the ladies of Hautecœur, the “happy dead,” as they were called in the Legend. In that family the women die young, in the midst of some great happiness. Sometimes two or three generations would be spared, then suddenly Death would appear, smiling, as with gentle hands he carried away the daughter or the wife of a Hautecœur, the oldest of them being scarcely twenty years of age, at the moment when they were at the height of earthly love and bliss. For instance, Laurette, daughter of Raoul I., on the evening of her betrothal to her cousin Richard, who lived in the castle, having seated herself at her window in the Tower of David, saw him at his window in the Tower of Charlemagne, and, thinking she heard him call her, as at that moment a ray of moonlight seemed to throw a bridge between them, she walked toward him. But when in the middle she made in her haste a false step and overpassed the ray, she fell, and was crushed at the foot of the tower. So since that day, each night when the moon is bright and clear, she can be seen walking in the air around the Château, which is bathed in white by the silent touch of her immense robe. Then Balbine, wife of Hervé VII., thought for six months that her husband had been killed in the wars. But, unwilling to give up all hope, she watched for him daily from the top of the donjon, and when at last she saw him one morning on the highway, returning to his home, she ran down quickly to meet him, but was so overcome with joy, that she fell dead at the entrance of the castle. Even at this day, notwithstanding the ruins, as soon as twilight falls, it is said she still descends the steps, runs from story to story, glides through the corridors and the rooms, and passes like a phantom through the gaping windows which open into the desert void. All return. Isabeau, Gudule, Vonne, Austreberthe, all these “happy dead,” loved by the stern messenger, who spared them from the vicissitudes of life by taking them suddenly when, in early youth, they thought only of happiness. On certain nights this white-robed band fill the house as if with a flight of doves. To their number had lately been added the mother of the son of Monseigneur, who was found lifeless on the floor by the cradle of her infant, where, although ill, she dragged