I told him briefly what had happened, and he replied, "Lose not a moment! Bring them all here. There is a letter for the lady, and an escort of my own men, with a safe conduct from my father. But you must put twenty leagues between you and Paris ere you sleep; for here, at this moment, no man could be certain of saving his own brother from hour to hour. No words, De Cerons, but away! To Geneva! to Geneva! if you would have safety." No words, indeed, were spent in vain. Louise and the rest were brought up from the boat, and, ere twenty minutes had passed, we were on the road to Switzerland. It was not till we had passed the French frontier that I could believe that the beloved being, now my own, was in safety; but there my joy was mingled with deep grief; for there we learned, for the first time, the extent of our loss, and found that the Barony of Blancford, as well as the Lordship of Cerons, had fallen to one who wept to receive them. Good old La Tour, too, was among the gone; and the Baroness de Blancford had not been suffered, by the wild beasts that were let loose upon the Protestants of France, to escape that fate which she made no effort to avert from her husband. EVA ST. CLAIR. A TALE. EVA ST. CLAIR. -------------- CHAPTER I. 'Twas a bright day in the autumn; the brown leaves were still upon the trees, the moss was springing up rich and green round the old roots and upon the sloping banks, and the sun, peeping in wherever the hand of Time had cast down their green garmenture from the earlier shrubs, checkered the ground every here and there with bright glances of yellow light, which, while the wind moved the branches gently above, waved slowly backward and forward, as if well pleased at the velvety cushion on which it rested. The scene was as still and solitary as it was possible to conceive; for those were days in which civil wars and angry strife had diminished by one half the population of merry England. No forester took his way through the wood; no guard of the king's chase or baron's huntsman watched to see whether some churl or yeoman was not aiming the shaft at the royal deer, or entangling the roebuck in a concealed snare. Stephen, pressed on all sides, had been forced to abandon rights for the sake of popularity; and many a wide track, deserted by its lord, and destitute of inhabitants, remained open to any one that chose to hunt within its precincts. A low wind sighed through the tops of the trees, and made the dry leaves whisper as if telling each other some solemn tale. The sun shone, as I have said; but with great silence and in the midst of solitude, there is something solemn even in sunshine. At length a woodpecker came down upon the green moss, ran up a neighbouring tree, knocked it with its bill where it seemed hollow, and then either came down again upon the ground, or flew on again to another tree, with the wild, melancholy sort of laugh to which that bird gives utterance while upon the wing.