She leaned towards him; her breath fanning his cheek, her scented hair brushing his lips, her lustrous eyes meeting his with eloquent meaning, her lips parted with the resistless witchery of that melting and seductive _sourire d'amour_ to which they were so admirably trained. He gazed down on her, breathless, silence-stricken--gazed down on the sorceress beauty to which the innocent loveliness of his Lorraine flower had changed. Was this woman, with the rouge upon her cheeks, the crimson roses in her hair, the mocking light in her eyes, the wicked laugh on her lips, the diamond glittering like a serpent's eye in her bosom--was she the guileless child he had left weeping, on the broken steps of the fountain, tears as pure as the dew in the violet-bells, with the summer sunlight streaming round her, and no shade on her young brow darker than the fleeting shadow flung from above by the vine-leaves? A cry broke once more from his lips: "Would to God I had died before to-night!" Then he lifted his head, with a smile upon his face--a smile that touched and vaguely terrified all those who saw it--the smile of a breaking heart. "I thank you for your proffered embraces, but _I_ am faithful. I love but one, and I have lost her; Favette is dead! I know nothing of Thargélie Dumarsais, the Courtesan." He bowed low to her and left her--never to see her face again. A silence fell on those he had quitted, even upon Richelieu; perhaps even he realized that all beauty, faith, and joy were stricken from this man's life; and--reality of feeling was an exile so universally banished from the gay salons of the Dix-huitième Siècle, that its intrusion awed them as by the unwonted presence of some ghostly visitant. Thargélie Dumarsais sat silent--her thoughts had flown away once more from her brilliant supper-chamber to the fountain at Grande Charmille: she was seeing the dragon-flies flutter among the elm-boughs, and the water ripple over the wild thyme; she was feeling the old priest's good-night kiss upon her brow, and her own hymn rise and mingle with the chant of the vesper choir; she was hearing the song of the forest-birds echo in the Lorraine woods, and a fond voice whisper to her, "Fear not, Favette!--we shall meet as we part!" Richelieu took up his Dresden saucer of cherries once more with a burst of laughter. "_Voilà un drôle!_--this fellow takes things seriously. What fools there are in this world! It will be a charming little story for Versailles. Dieu! how Louis will laugh when I tell it him! I fear though, ma chérie, that the 'friend of your childhood' will make you lose your reputation by his impolite epithets!" "When one has nothing, one can lose nothing--eh, ma chère?" laughed Marie Camargo. "Monsieur le Duc, she does not hear us----" "No, _l'infidèle_!" cried Richelieu. "Mademoiselle! I see plainly you love this rude lover of bygone days better than you do us!--is it not the truth?"