Though a dreamy boy, he had grown up not unconscious of his own claims upon the world or of his position as one who would some day exact obedience. With powers of thought developed beyond his years, he had not so much the making of a scholar as of a student and lover of men. Under a heaviness which might almost have been mistaken for sullenness of disposition, there lurked possibilities of imagination and of power which none but M. des Graves guessed, and he kept his own counsel. But those who had eyes to see might have noticed that Gilbert received severer censure for any show of idleness in his studies than ever did Louis for a similar (and infinitely more frequent) offence. The priest was very thoughtful on the day that the marquis told him how few weeks more were left to him of his elder pupil, although he had always known of the career for which Gilbert was destined. Gilbert, as well as M. des Graves, had long been aware that he was going to the military academy at Versailles. Of another arrangement he was still ignorant. His parents had already selected his future wife in the person of the little girl, now aged seven, with whom he had sometimes played. The match had made itself. The Marquis had always an affection for Lucienne, and the now widowed Madame d’Aucourt desired a closer union with the family of her old friend. The nine years’ difference between the ages of the prospective bride and bridegroom was approved, and Lucienne’s dowry, as an only child, was satisfactory. Gilbert received the news with equanimity; the day when he should marry seemed very far off, obscured behind the peaks of the new life upon which he was entering. For the rest, he was fond of the child. For a little while Louis remained behind at Chantemerle to struggle with the Latin authors, to plague and charm the servants as of yore, and to look enviously at his cousin when he came home in his new uniform. Then the influence of his mother’s relatives procured him a place in the royal pages, preparatory to his entering the bodyguard, and the Château fell into a quietude which it had never known since his advent on that March afternoon seven years before. A child, however, still woke the echoes in the garden every summer. Till her tenth year Gilbert’s destined bride paid annual—sometimes even more frequent—visits with her mother, and once or twice these visits coincided with the leave of one or other of the boys of whose own childhood she had formed a part. She was now an extremely pretty child, but at this epoch the cousins were both too much absorbed in their new worlds to pay her particular attention, and her future husband took, if possible, less notice of her than did Louis. At ten her mother sent her to be educated in a convent.