the louder. Are not all young
men ready to trust the promise of a pretty face and to infer beauty
of soul from beauty of feature? An indefinable impulse leads them to
believe that moral perfection must co-exist with physical perfection. If
Angelique had not been at liberty to give vent to her sentiments, they
would soon have dried up in her heart like a plant watered with some
deadly acid. How should a lover be aware of bigotry so well hidden?

This was the course of young Granville's feelings during that fortnight,
devoured by him like a book of which the end is absorbing. Angelique,
carefully watched by him, seemed the gentlest of creatures, and he even
caught himself feeling grateful to Madame Bontems, who, by implanting so
deeply the principles of religion, had in some degree inured her to meet
the troubles of life.

On the day named for signing the inevitable contract, Madame Bontems
made her son-in-law pledge himself solemnly to respect her daughter's
religious practices, to allow her entire liberty of conscience, to
permit her to go to communion, to church, to confession as often as she
pleased, and never to control her choice of priestly advisers. At this
critical moment Angelique looked at her future husband with such pure
and innocent eyes, that Granville did not hesitate to give his word. A
smile puckered the lips of the Abbe Fontanon, a pale man, who directed
the consciences of this household. Mademoiselle Bontems, by a slight
nod, seemed to promise that she would never take an unfair advantage of
this freedom. As to the old Count, he gently whistled the tune of an
old song, _Va-t-en-voir s'ils viennent_ ("Go and see if they are coming
on!")

A few days after the wedding festivities of which so much is thought in
the provinces, Granville and his wife went to Paris, whither the young
man was recalled by his appointment as public prosecutor to the Supreme
Court of the Seine circuit.

When the young couple set out to find a residence, Angelique used the
influence that the honeymoon gives to every wife in persuading her
husband to take a large apartment in the ground-floor of a house at the
corner of the Vieille Rue du Temple and the Rue Nueve Saint-Francois.
Her chief reason for this choice was that the house was close to the Rue
d'Orleans, where there was a church, and not far from a small chapel in
the Rue Saint-Louis.

"A good housewife provides for everything," said her husband, laughing.

Angel