However unfilial it might be, she could not stifle a certain sympathy for this young man. She imagined that his rebellion, whatever shape it had assumed, had been provoked by that weal upon his face; and it seemed to her then that he had been less than a man had he not attempted to exact some reparation for the hurt the whip had inflicted at once upon his body and his soul. “But what is it that he has done, Monsieur?” she asked, seeking more than the scant information which so far she had received. “Enough, at least, to justify my hanging him,” answered Bellecour grimly. “He sought to withstand my authority; he incited the peasants of Bellecour to withstand it; he has killed Blaise, and he would have killed me but that I preferred to let him kill my horse.” “In what way did he seek to withstand your authority!” she persisted. He stared at her, half surprised, half angry. “What doers the manner of it signify?” he asked impatiently. “Is not the fact enough? Is it not enough that Blaise is dead, and that I have had a narrow escape, at his hands?” “Insolent hound that he is!” put in Madame la Marquise--a fleshly lady monstrously coiffed. “If we allow such men as thus to live in France our days are numbered.” “They say that you are going to hang him,” said Suzanne, heedless of her mother's words, and there was the faintest note of horror in her voice. “They are mistaken. I am not.” “You are not?” cried the Marquise. “But what, then, do you intend to do?” “To keep my word, madame,” he answered her. “I promised that canaille that if he ever came within the grounds of Bellecour I would have him flogged to death. That is what I propose.” “Father,” gasped Suzanne, in horror, a horror that was echoed by the other three or four ladies present. But the Marquise only laughed. “He will be; richly served,” she approved, with a sage nod of her pumpkin-like head-dress--“most richly served.” A great pity arose now in the heart of Mademoiselle, as her father went below that he might carry out his barbarous design. She was deaf to the dainty trifles which the most elegant Chevalier de Jacquelin was murmuring into her ear. She stood, a tall, queenly figure, at the balcony's parapet and watched the preparations that were being made. She heard her father's harshly-voiced commands. She saw them literally tear the clothes from the unfortunate secretary's back, and lash him--naked to the waist--to the pump that stood by the horse-trough at the far end of the yard. His body was now hidden from her sight, but his head appeared surmounting the pillar of the pump, his chin seeming to rest upon its summit, and his face was towards her. At his side stood a powerful knave armed with a stout, leather-thonged whip. “How many strokes, Monseigneur?” she heard the man inquire. “How many?” echoed the Marquise. “Do I know how many it will take to make an end of him? Beat him to death, man. Allons! Set about it.”