Paris, to place her under the tutelage of the Queen-Regent. I will not
conceal from you that we were chagrined at the reflection cast upon
Condillac; nevertheless, Her Majesty's word is law in Dauphiny as much
as it is in Paris."

"Quite as much, and I am relieved to hear you confess it," said Garnache
drily, and he scanned more closely the face of this young man. He found
cause to modify the excellent impression he had received at first.
Marius's eyebrows were finely pencilled, but they arched a shade too
much, and his eyes were set a trifle too closely; the mouth, which
had seemed beautiful at first, looked, in addition, on this closer
inspection, weak, sensual, and cruel.

There fell upon the momentary silence the sound of an opening door, and
both men rose simultaneously to their feet.

In the splendid woman that entered, Monsieur de Garnache saw a wonderful
likeness to the boy who stood beside him. She received the emissary very
graciously. Marius set a chair for her between the two they had been
occupying, and thus interchanging phrases of agreeable greeting the
three sat down about the hearth with every show of the greatest amity.

A younger man might have been put out of countenance; the woman's
surpassing beauty, her charm of manner, her melodious voice, falling
on the ear soft and gentle as a caress, might have turned a man of less
firmness a little from his purpose, a little perhaps from his loyalty
and the duty that had brought him all the way from Paris. But Monsieur
de Garnache was to her thousand graces as insensible as a man of stone.
And he came to business briskly. He had no mind to spend the day at her
fireside in pleasant, meaningless talk.

"Madame," said he, "monsieur your son informs me that you have heard of
me and of the business that brings me into Dauphiny. I had not looked
for the honour of journeying quite so far as Condillac; but since
Monsieur de Tressan, whom I made my ambassador, appears to have failed
so signally, I am constrained to inflict my presence upon you."

"Inflict?" quoth she, with a pretty look of make-believe dismay. "How
harsh a word, monsieur!"

The smoothness of the implied compliment annoyed him.

"I will use any word you think more adequate, madame, if you will
suggest it," he answered tartly.

"There are a dozen I might suggest that would better fit the case--and
with more justice to yourself," she answered, with a smile that revealed
a gleam of white teeth b