y for the assistance she had rendered to his
young friend and guest; she answered with a shade of stiffness, that she
left her kinsman in good hands, and said she should send to inquire
that evening, and her father would call on the morrow; then, as Lady
Walsingham did not ask her in, the black and white coach drove away.

The lady threw herself back in one corner, covered her face, and spoke
no word. Her coach pursued its way through the streets, and turned at
length into another great courtyard, surrounded with buildings, where
she alighted, and stepped across a wide but dirty hall, where ranks
of servants stoop up and bowed as she passed; then she ascended a
wide carved staircase, opened a small private door, and entered a tiny
wainscoted room hardly large enough for her farthingale to turn round
in. 'You, Veronique, come in--only you,' she said, at the door; and a
waiting-woman, who had been in the carriage, obeyed, no longer clad in
the Angevin costume, but in the richer and less characteristic dress of
the ordinary Parisian _femme de chambre_.

'Undo my mantle in haste!' gasped Madame de Selinville. 'O
Veronique--you saw--what destruction!'

'Ah! if my sweet young lady only known how frightful he had become, she
had never sacrificed herself,' sighed Veronique.

'Frightful! What, with the grave blue eyes that seem like the steady
avenging judgment of St. Michael in his triumph in the picture at the
Louvre?' murmured Madame de Selinville; then she added quickly, 'Yes,
yes, it is well. She and you, Veronique, may see him frightful and
welcome. There are other eyes--make haste, girl. There--another
handerchief. Follow me not.'

And Madame de Selinville moved out of the room, past the great state
bedroom and the _salle_ beyond, to another chamber where more servants
waited and rose at her entrance.

'Is any one with my father?'

'No, Madame;' and a page knocking, opened the door and announced,
'Madame la Comtesse.'

The Chevalier, in easy _deshabille_, with a flask of good wine, iced
water, and delicate cakes and _confitures_ before him, a witty and
licentious epigrammatic poem close under his hand, sat lazily enjoying
the luxuries that it had been his daughter's satisfaction to procure for
him ever since her marriage. He sprang up to meet her with a grace
and deference that showed how different a person was the Comtesse de
Selinville from Diane de Ribaumont.

'Ah! _ma belle_, my sweet,' as there was a mutua