stening them on another
stage before night, when a weary, travel-stained trooper rode up to the
door and was at once hailed as a comrade by the other men, and asked,
'What cheer at Pont de Dronne?'

'Bad enough,' he answered, 'unless you can make the more speed there!'
then making obeisance to Berenger he continued his report, saying that
Captain Falconnet was sending him to M. le Duc with information that
the Guisards were astir, and that five hundred _gens d'armes_, under
the black Nid de Merle, as it was said, were on their way intending
to surprise Pont de Dronne, and thus cut the King of Navarre off from
Guyenne and his kingdom beyond it. After this Berenger had no more
difficulty with his men, who were most of them Quinet vassals, with
homes south of the Dronne, and the messenger only halted for a hasty
meal, hastening on to the Duke, that a more considerable succour might
at once be dispatched.

'Is she there whom they call the Lady of Hope?' asked one of the
soldiers, a mercenary, less interested than most of his comrades, as he
had only a fortnight since transferred his services from Guise to Quinet.

'Our Lady of Sadness just now,' replied the messenger; 'her old father
is at the point of death. However, she is there, and at our last siege
twenty wine-skins would not so well have kept up men's hearts.'

'And the little one, the white fairy, is she there too? They say 'tis
a spirit, a changeling that could not brook the inside of a church, but
flew out of the Moustier at Montauban like a white swan, in the middle
of a sermon.'

'I only know I've seen her sleep like a dormouse through prayers,
sermon, and all at Pont de Dronne. _Follette_ is she be, she belongs to
the white elves of the moonlight.'

'Well, they say bullets won't touch her, and no place can be taken where
she is,' replied the trooper. 'Nay, that Italian pedlar rogue, the same
that the Duke has since hung, has sold to long Gilles and snub-nosed
Pierre silver bullets, wherewith they have sworn to shoot the one or the
other next time they had