How her mind projected itself into the future! What wild inconceivable, impracticable projects she formed, destroyed, and reconstructed once more! She overleaped probability, possibility, the usages of life, the very lapse of time. At a bound she was walking with him through her woods in Touraine, his own, his very own. They had given up Paris, the Court, ambition, society, everything in the world for each other, and they were so happy! so happy! Cerise, herself, and _him_. Ah! she felt now the capabilities she had for goodness. She knew what she could be with a man like that—a man whom she could respect as well as love. She almost felt the pressure of his arm, while his kind, brave face looked down into her own, under just such a moon as that rising even now through the trees above the guard-house. Then she came back to her boudoir in the Hôtel Montmirail, and the consciousness, the triumphant consciousness that, come what might, she must at least see him and hear his voice within an hour; but recalling the masked ball at the Opera House the night before, she trembled and turned pale, thinking she would never dare to look him in the face again. There was yet another subject of anxiety. The Prince-Marshal was to come, as he often did of an evening, and pass half-an-hour over a cup of coffee before he retired to rest. It made her angry to think of her old admirer, as if she did indeed already belong to some one else. How long that some one seemed in coming, and yet she had sat there, hot and cold by turns, for but five minutes, unless her clock had stopped. Suddenly, with a great start, she sprang from her chair, and listened, upright, with parted lips and hair put back. No! her ear was not deceived! It had caught the clink of spurs, and a faint measured footfall, outside in the distant street. CHAPTER XX A GENERAL RENDEZVOUS Meanwhile Cerise, not the least sleepy, though sent prematurely to bed, dismissed her attendant protesting vehemently, and sat herself down also at an open window, to breathe the night air, look at the moon, and dream, wide-awake, on such subjects as arise most readily in young ladies’ minds when they find themselves alone with their own thoughts in the summer evening. However exalted these may have been, they can scarcely have soared to the actual romance of which she was an unconscious heroine, or foreseen the drama of action and sentiment she was about to witness in person. Little did she imagine, while she leaned a sweet face, pale and serene in the moonlight, on an arm half hidden in the wealth of her unbound hair, that two men were watching every movement who could have kissed the very ground she trod on; for one of whom she was the type of all that seemed best and loveliest in woman, teaching him to look from earth to heaven; for the other, an angel of light, pure and holy in herself, yet luring him irresistibly down the path to hell.