very disobedient. Why not stay as we are? Why
not sacrifice to me the desires that hurt me? Why not take what I can
give, when it is all that I can honestly grant? Are you not happy?"

"Oh yes, I am happy when I have not a doubt left. Antoinette, doubt in
love is a kind of death, is it not?"

In a moment he showed himself as he was, as all men are under the
influence of that hot fever; he grew eloquent, insinuating. And the
Duchess tasted the pleasures which she reconciled with her conscience
by some private, Jesuitical ukase of her own; Armand's love gave her a
thrill of cerebral excitement which custom made as necessary to her as
society, or the Opera. To feel that she was adored by this man, who rose
above other men, whose character frightened her; to treat him like a
child; to play with him as Poppaea played with Nero--many women, like
the wives of King Henry VIII, have paid for such a perilous delight with
all the blood in their veins. Grim presentiment! Even as she surrendered
the delicate, pale, gold curls to his touch, and felt the close pressure
of his hand, the little hand of a man whose greatness she could not
mistake; even as she herself played with his dark, thick locks, in that
boudoir where she reigned a queen, the Duchess would say to herself:

"This man is capable of killing me if he once finds out that I am
playing with him."

Armand de Montriveau stayed with her till two o'clock in the morning.
From that moment this woman, whom he loved, was neither a duchess nor a
Navarreins; Antoinette, in her disguises, had gone so far as to appear
to be a woman. On that most blissful evening, the sweetest prelude ever
played by a Parisienne to what the world calls "a slip"; in spite of all
her affectations of a coyness which she did not feel, the General saw
all maidenly beauty in her. He had some excuse for believing that so
many storms of caprice had been but clouds covering a heavenly soul;
that these must be lifted one by one like the veils that hid her divine
loveliness. The Duchess became, for him, the most simple and girlish
mistress; she was the one woman in the world for him; and he went away
quite happy in that at last he had brought her to give him such pledges
of love, that it seemed to him impossible but that he should be but her
husband henceforth in secret, her choice sanctioned by Heaven.

Armand went slowly home, turning this thought in his mind with the
impartiality of a man who is conscious