will settle between them, and generally opens wide once more the door for negotiation. At this and subsequent interviews at Kenilworth she exerted all her powers of fascination upon La Mole and La Mothe, who were both ready enough to flatter her to the top of her bent. She played her spinet to them, sighed that she was determined to marry and must see the Duke at once, and persistently set her cap at young La Mole as proxy for his master. Solid Cecil and jocose Smith appear to have been almost as much carried away as La Mole. They both wrote to Walsingham the belief that at last the affair would prosper in good earnest, if only the lover would take the trouble to run over to England and see the object of his affection. There are plenty of ways, said Smith, of coming over; and he would do more in an hour than we could do in two years--“Cupido ille qui vincit omnia in oculis insidet,” and so on. Everything seemed to be prospering in the wooing, though the Queen herself was no more in earnest than before; and doubtless she and Leicester laughed in their sleeves at the way they were hoodwinking some of the keenest eyes of both nations. One person they certainly did not deceive, and that was Catharine de Medici; for at the very moment when all this billing and cooing was going on the massacre of St. Bartholomew was being planned, and the person who was being kept in hand and cajoled into a false sense of security, notwithstanding the refusal of Charles IX. to help the Hollanders, was Elizabeth herself. But deceived though she was, she had prudence enough to mistrust the curious new attitude adopted by the French, whose one object was to draw her into a position of overt enmity to Spain in the Netherlands, whilst Charles IX. deprecated taking up such a position for himself. La Mole’s blandishments were not powerful enough for this; and after twenty days’ stay he and La Mothe left the Queen with great professions of love and affection and a gold chain worth 500 ducats for the young envoy, and came to London, where they arrived on the 27th of August. On the same day there arrived at Rye two couriers from Paris, one with letters from Walsingham to the Queen, and the other with despatches for La Mothe Fénélon, the French ambassador. Acting by order the English courier immediately on his arrival caused the authorities of the port to seize the papers of the other courier and send them together with Walsingham’s letters in all haste to the Queen at Kenilworth. The Queen was out hunting when they arrived, and read in them first as she rode the news of St. Bartholomew--overwhelmed with the great tragedy which seemed to be as much directed against herself as against the French Huguenots. All rejoicings were stopped, mourning garb was adopted, and long, anxious conferences took the place of gay diversion. Before the Queen herself received the news the dire calamity had become known in London. Terrified Huguenots by the hundred, flying,