She dropped her words out one by one, cool, passionless, and brutal in their clearness. My face was hot with shame and anger, and yet I knew that the ribald tongues that spared not the King's sister would not spare me. I, the heiress of Mieux, to be a by-word in the court! I to be married out of hand like a laundress of the _coulisse!_ It was too much! It was unbearable! And to be bound to de Lorgnac above all others! Was ever woman wooed and wed as I? I burst into a passion of angry tears. I went so far as to humble myself on my knees; but Henri only laughed and slipped out by the secret door, and de Tavannes followed him with a rough oath. "Say this is a jest, madame!" I sobbed out to the Queen. "I am punished enough. Say it is a jest. It must be so. You do not mean it. It is too cruel!" "No more is happening to you than what the daughters of France have to bear sometimes." "That should make you the more pitiful, madame, for such as I. Let me go, madame, to a nunnery--even to that of Our Lady of Lespaille--but spare me this!" "It is impossible," she said sharply. "See, here is Madame de Martigny come, and she will conduct you to your room. Tush! It is nothing after all, girl. And it will be better than a convent and a lost name. Do not make a scene." I rose to my feet stunned and bewildered, and Madame de Martigny put her arm through mine, and dried my eyes with her kerchief. "Come, mademoiselle," she said, "we have to pass through the corridor to gain your apartment. Keep up your heart!" "I offer my escort," mocked the dwarf, "and will go so far as to take M. de Lorgnac's place, if your royal pleasure will allow--ah! ah!"--and he broke into a shriek, for Catherine had swiftly and silently raised a dog-whip, and brought it across his shoulders as he sat crouching at her feet. "Begone!" she said. "Another speech like that and I break you on the wheel!" Then she turned to Madame de Martigny. "Take her away by the private door. She is not fit to see or be seen now. Tell Pare to give her a cordial if she needs it, and see that she is ready in time. Go, mademoiselle, and be a brave girl!" CHAPTER II. THE ORATORY You who read this will please remember that I was but a girl, and that my powers of resistance were limited. Some of you, perhaps, may have gone through the same ordeal, not in the rough-and-ready way that I had to make the passage, but through a slower if not less certain mill. The result being the same in both cases, to wit, that you have stood, as I did, at the altar with vows on your lips that you felt in your heart were false.