"Your reign is over, gentlemen," said Catherine to the two Guises, seeing from Paré's manner that there was now no hope. "You, madame, have killed your son!" said Mary Stuart, springing like a lioness from the bed to the window, and seizing the Italian Queen by the arm with a vehement clutch. "My dear," replied Catherine de' Medici, with a keen, cold look that expressed the hatred she had suppressed for six months past, "you, to whose violent passion this death is due, will now go to reign over your own Scotland--and you will go to-morrow. I am now Regent in fact as well as in name." The three physicians had made a sign to the Queen-mother. "Gentlemen," she went on, addressing the Guises, "it is an understood thing between Monsieur de Bourbon--whom I hereby appoint Lieutenant-General of the kingdom--and myself that the conduct of affairs is our business.--Come, Monsieur le Chancelier." "The King is dead!" said the Grand Master, obliged to carry out the functions of his office. "God save King Charles IX.!" cried the gentleman who had come with the King of Navarre, the Prince de Condé, and the Constable. The ceremonies performed when a King of France dies were carried out in solitude. When the king-at-arms called out three times in the great hall, "The King is dead!" after the official announcement by the Duc de Guise, there were but a few persons present to answer--"God save the King!" The Queen-mother, to whom the Countess Fieschi brought the Duc d'Orléans, now Charles IX., left the room leading the boy by the hand, and followed by the whole Court. Only the two Guises, the Duchesse de Guise, Mary Stuart, and Dayelle remained in the room where Francis II. had breathed his last, with two guards at the door, the Grand Master's pages and the Cardinal's, and their two private secretaries. "Vive la France!" shouted some of the Reformers, a first cry of opposition. Robertet, who owed everything to the Duke and the Cardinal, terrified by their schemes and their abortive attempts, secretly attached himself to the Queen-mother, whom the Ambassadors of Spain, England, the German Empire, and Poland met on the stairs, at their head Cardinal Tournon, who had gone to call them after looking up from the courtyard to Catherine de' Medici just as she was protesting against Ambroise Paré's operation. "Well, the sons of Louis d'Outre-Mer, the descendants of Charles de Lorraine, have proved cravens," said the Cardinal to the Duke. "They would have been packed off to Lorraine," replied his brother. "I declare to you, Charles," he went on, "if the crown were there for the taking, I would not put out my hand for it. That will be my son's task." "Will he ever have the army and the Church on his side as you have?" "He will have something better." "What?" "The people." "And there is no one to mourn for him but me--the poor boy who loved me so well!" said Mary Stuart, holding the cold hand of her first husband.