"Favette! Favette!" he murmured, hoarsely, in the vague dreamy agony with which a man calls wildly and futilely on the beloved dead to come back to him from the silence and horror of the grave. "Peste!" laughed Richelieu. "This cast-off lover seems a strange fellow! Does he not know that absent people have never the presumption to dream of keeping their places, but learn to give them graciously up!--shall I teach him the lesson? If he have his sixteen quarterings, a prick of my sword will soon punish his impudence!" The jeer fell unheeded on Léon de Tallemont's ear; had he heard it, the flippant sneer would have had no power to sting him then. Regardless of the men around the supper-table, he grasped Thargélie Dumarsais's hands in his: "This is how we meet!" She shrank away from his glance, terrified, she scarce knew why, at the mute anguish upon his face. Perhaps for a moment she realized how utterly she had abused the love and wrecked the life of this man; perhaps with his voice came back to her thronging thoughts of guileless days, memories ringing through the haze of years, as distant chimes ring over the water from lands we have quitted, reaching us when we have floated far away out to sea--memories of an innocent and untroubled life, when she had watched the woodland flowers open to the morning sun, and listened to the song of the brooks murmuring over the violet roots, and heard the sweet evening song of the birds rise to heaven under the deep vine shadows of Lorraine. One moment she was silent, her eyes falling, troubled and guilty, beneath his gaze; then she looked up, laughing gayly, and flashing on him her languid lustrous glance. "You look like a somnambulist, _mon ami_! Did nobody ever tell you, then, how Mme. de la Vrillière carried me off from Lorraine, and brought me in her train to Paris, till, when Favette Fontanie was tired of being petted like the spaniel, the monkey, and the parrot, she broke away from Madame la Marquise, and made, after a little probation at the Foire St. Laurent, her appearance at the Français as Thargélie Dumarsais? _Allons donc!_ have I lost my beauty, that you look at me thus? You should be reminding me of the proverb, '_On revient toujours à ses premiers amours!_' Surely, Thargélie Dumarsais will be as attractive to teach such a lesson as that little peasant girl, Favette, used to be? Bah, Léon! Can I not love you as well again in Paris as I once loved you at Grande Charmille? And--who knows?--perhaps I will!"