'Alas! poor thing!' said the minister, compassionately, 'Heaven has
tried you sorely. Had I known of your presence here, I would not
have entered; but I have been absent long, and stole into my lair
here without disturbing the good people below. Forgive the
intrusion, Madame.'

The minister replied warmly that surely persecution was a
brotherhood, even had she not been the window of one he had loved
and lamented.

'Ah! sir, it does me good to hear you say so.'

And therewith Eustacie remembered the hospitalities of her loft.
She perceived by the tones of the old man's voice that he was
tired, and probably fasting, and she felt about for the milk and
bread with which she had been supplied. It was a most welcome
refreshment, though he only partook sparingly; and while he ate,
the two, so strangely met, came to a fuller knowledge of one
another's circumstances.

Master Isaac Gardon had, it appeared, been residing at Paris, in
the house of the watchmaker whose daughter had been newly married
to his son; but on the fatal eve of St. Bartholomew, he had been
sent for to pray with a sick person in another quarter of the city.
The Catholic friends of the invalid were humane, and when the
horrors began, not only concealed their kinsman, but almost
forcibly shut up the minister in the same cellar with him. And
thus, most reluctantly, had he been spared from the fate that
overtook his son and daughter-in-law. A lone and well-night
broken-hearted man, he had been smuggled out of the city, and had