Her answer was simple; but as Léontine de Rennecourt spoke it, leaning her cheek against his breast, with her eyes dazzling as the diamonds in her hair, looking up into his by the light of the stars, they had an eloquence far more dangerous than speech, and delirious to the senses as magician's perfumes. His lips lingered on hers, and felt the loud fast throbs of the heart she had won as he bent over her, pressing her closer and closer to him--vanquished and conquered, as men in all ages and of all creeds have been vanquished and conquered by women, all other thoughts fleeing away into oblivion, all fears dying out, all vows forgotten in the warm, living life of passion and of joy, that, for the first time in a brief life, flooded his heart with its golden voluptuous light. "You love me? So be it," he murmured; "but beware what you do, my life lies in your hands, and you must be mine till death part us!" "Till my fancy change rather!" thought Madame la Marquise, as she put her jewelled hand on his lips, her hair softly brushing his cheek, with a touch as soft, and an odor as sweet, as the leaves of one of the roses twining below. Two men strolling below under the limes of Petite Forêt--discussing the last scandals of Versailles, talking of the ascendency of La Fontanges, of the Spanish dress his Majesty had reassumed to please her, of the Brinvilliers' Poudre de Succession, of the new château given to Père de la Chaise, of D'Aubigny's last extravagance and Lauzun's last mot, and the last gossip about Bossuet and Mademoiselle de Mauléon, and all the chit-chat of that varied day, glittering with wit and prolific of poison--glanced up to the balcony by the light of the stars. "That cursed priest!" muttered the younger, le Vicomte de Saint-Elix, as he struck the head off a lily with his delicate cane. "In a fool's paradise! Ah-ha! Madame la Marquise!" laughed the other--the old Duc de Clos-Vougeot--taking a chocolate sweetmeat out of his emerald-studded bonbonnière as they walked on, while the lime-blossoms shook off in the summer night wind and dropped dead on the grass beneath, laughing at the story of the box D'Artagnan had found in Lauzun's rooms when he seized his papers, containing the portraits of sixty women of high degree who had worshipped the resistless Captain of the Guard, with critical and historical notices penned under each; notices D'Artagnan and his aide could not help indiscreetly retailing, in despite of the Bourbon command of secrecy--secrecy so necessary where sixty beauties and saints were involved!