cie,
pouting. 'She has lands enough of her own.'

'There is no need to discuss the question now,' said M. Gardon, gravely;
for a most kind offer, involving much peril and inconvenience to
himself, was thus petulantly flouted. 'Madame will think at her leisure
of what would have been the wishes of Monsieur le Baron for his child.'

He then held himself aloof, knowing that it was not well for her health,
mental or bodily, to talk any more, and a good deal perplexed himself by
the moods of his strange little impetuous convert, if convert she could
be termed. He himself was a deeply learned scholar, who had studied
all the bearings of the controversy; and, though bound to the French
Reformers who would gladly have come to terms with the Catholics at the
Conference of Plassy, and regretted the more decided Calvinism that
his party had since professed, and in which the Day of St. Bartholomew
confirmed them. He had a strong sense of the grievous losses they
suffered by their disunion from the Church. The Reformed were less and
less what his ardent youthful hopes had trusted to see them; and in his
old age he was a sorrow-stricken man, as much for the cause of religion
as for personal bereavements. He had little desire to win proselytes,
but rather laid his hand to build up true religion where he found it
suffering shocks in these unsettled, neglected times; and his present
wish was rather to form and guide this little willful warm-hearted
mother--whom he could not help regarding with as much affection as
pity--to find a home in the Church that had been her husband's, than
to gain her to his own party. And most assuredly he would never let her
involve herself, as she was ready to do, in the civil war, without even
knowing the doctrine which grave and earnest men had preferred to their
loyalty.

He could hear her murmuring to her baby, 'No, no, little one, we are not
fallen so low as to beg our bread among strangers.' To live upon her own
vassals had seemed to her only claiming her just rights, but it galled
her to think 