d
it in perfect silence, which silence continued until they reached
the chateau, where the lady met them at the door with a burst of
exclamations.

'Ah, there you are, safe, my dear Baron. I have been in despair. Here
were the Count and his brother come to call on you to join them in
dispersing a meeting of those poor Huguenots and they would not permit
me to send out to call you in! I verily think they suspected that you
were aware of it.'

M. de Ribaumont made no answer, but sat wearily down and asked for his
little Eustacie.

'Little vixen!' exclaimed the Baroness, 'she is gone; her father took
her away with him.' And as her husband looked extremely displeased, she
added that Eustacie had been meddling with her jewel cabinet and had
been put in penitence. Her first impulse on seeing her father had been
to cling to him and poor out her complaints, whereupon he had declared
that he should take her away with him at once, and had in effect caused
her pony to be saddled, and he had ridden away with her to his old
tower, leaving his brother, the Chevalier, to conduct the attack on the
Huguenot conventicle.

'He had no power or right to remove her,' said the Baron. 'How could you
let him do so in my absence? He had made over her wardship to me, and
has no right to resume it!'

'Well, perhaps I might have insisted on his waiting till your return;
but, you see, the children have never done anything but quarrel and
fight, and always by Eustacie's fault; and if ever they are to endure
each other, it must be by being separated now.'

'Madame,' said the Baron, gravely, 'you have done your utmost to ruin
your son's chances of happiness.'

That same evening arrived the King's passport permitting the Baron
de Ribaumont and his family to pay a visit to his wife's friends in
England. The next morning the Baron was summoned to speak to one of
his farmers, a Huguenot, who had come to inform him that, through the
network of intelligence kept up by the members of the persecuted faith,
it had become known that the Chevalier de Ribau