The story was, in truth, then, but little understood. A thousand rumors were abroad, and of course no one accurately true; yet in each there was a share of truth, and the amount of the whole was perhaps less wide of the mark than is usual in matters of the kind. And thus they ran: Marguerite de Vaudreuil had been betrothed to the youngest of France’s famous warriors, Charles de La-Hirè, who after a time fell--as it was related by his young friend and kinsman Armand de Laguy--covered with wounds and honor. The body had been found outstretched beneath the survivor, who, himself desperately hurt, had alone witnessed and in vain endeavored to prevent his cousin’s slaughter. The face of Charles de La-Hirè, as all men deemed the corpse to be, was mangled and defaced so frightfully as to render recognition by the features utterly hopeless; yet, from the emblazoned surcoat which it bore, the well-known armor on the limbs, the signet-ring upon the finger, and the accustomed sword clinched in the dead right hand, none doubted the identity of the body, or questioned the truth of Armand’s story. Armand de Laguy, succeeding by his cousin’s death to all his lands and lordships, returned to the metropolis, and mixed in the gayeties of that gay period, when all the court of France was revelling in the celebration of the union of the dauphin with the lovely Mary Stuart, in after-days the hapless queen of Scotland. He wore no decent and accustomed garb of mourning. He suffered no interval, however brief--due to decorum at least, if not to kindly feeling--to elapse, before it was announced that Marguerite de Vaudreuil, the dead man’s late betrothed, was instantly to wed his living cousin! Her wondrous beauty, her all-seductive manners, her extreme youth, had in vain pleaded against the general censure of the court--the world. Men had frowned on her for a while, and women sneered and slandered; but after a little while, as the novelty of the story wore away, the indignation against her inconstancy ceased, and she was once again installed the leader of the court’s unwedded beauties. Suddenly, on the very eve of her intended nuptials, Charles de La-Hirè returned!--ransomed, as it turned out, by Brissac, from the Italian dungeons of the prince of Parma, and making fearful charges of treason and intended murder against Armand de Laguy. The king had commanded that the truth should be proved by a solemn combat; had sworn to execute upon the felon’s block whichever of the two should yield or confess falsehood; had sworn that the inconstant Marguerite--who, on the return of De La-Hirè, had returned instantly to her former feelings, asserting her perfect confidence in the truth of Charles, the treachery of Armand--should either wed the victor, or live and die the inmate of the most rigorous convent in his realm.