I will do what you advise." "You promise it ?" "I do." Her two visitors threw up their hands together.

"It is a blessed day," they cried, "and generations yet unborn will learn to deem it so." She sat half stunned by the prospect which was opening out in front of her.

Ambitious she had, as the Jesuit had surmised, always been-- ambitious for the power which would enable her to leave the world better than she found it.

And this ambition she had already to some extent been able to satisfy, for more than once she had swayed both king and kingdom.

But to marry the king--to marry the man for whom she would gladly lay down her life, whom in the depths of her heart she loved in as pure and as noble a fashion as woman ever yet loved man--that was indeed a thing above her utmost hopes.