s:

"'Ci git mon Giles,
Ah! qu'il est bien,
Pour son repos,
Et pour le mien!'

"Men are like my Angora tabby: stroke them smoothly and they will purr
and rub noses with you; but stroke them the wrong way and whirr! they
scratch your hands and out of the window they fly! When I was the
Charming--"

"Oh, good dame, thanks! thanks! for the comfort you have given me!"
interrupted Caroline, not caring for a fresh reminiscence of the
Charming Josephine. "Leave me, I pray. My mind is in a sad tumult. I
would fain rest. I have much to fear, but something also to hope for
now," she said, leaning back in her chair in deep and quiet thought.

"The Chateau is very still now, my Lady," replied the dame, "the
servants are all worn out with long attendance and fast asleep. Let my
Lady go to her own apartments, which are bright and airy. It will be
better for her than this dull chamber."

"True, dame!" Caroline rose at the suggestion. "I like not this secret
chamber. It suited my sad mood, but now I seem to long for air and
sunshine. I will go with you to my own room."

They ascended the winding stair, and Caroline seated herself by the
window of her own chamber, overlooking the park and gardens of the
Chateau. The huge, sloping forest upon the mountain side, formed, in the
distance, with the blue sky above it, a landscape of beauty, upon which
her eyes lingered with a sense of freshness and delight.

Dame Tremblay left her to her musings, to go, she said, to rouse up the
lazy maids and menservants, to straighten up the confusion of everything
in the Chateau after the late long feast.

On the great stair she encountered M. Froumois, the Intendant's valet,
a favorite gossip of the dame's, who used to invite him into her snug
parlor, where she regaled him with tea and cake, or, if late in the
evening, with wine and nipperkins of Cognac, while he poured into her
ear stories of the gay life of Paris and the bonnes fortunes of himself
and master--for the valet in plush would have disdained being less
successful among the maids in the servants' hall than his master in
velvet in the boudoirs of their mistresses.

M. Froumois accepted the dame's invitation, and the two were presently
engaged in a melee of gossip over the sayings and doings of fashionable
society in Quebec.

The dame, holding between her thumb and finger a little china cup of tea
well laced, she called it, with Cognac, remarked,--"The