'Vous ne donnez point votre cœur, Du diable il sera le vainqueur."[19] "Can you invent no other rhymes?" exclaimed D'Alvimar. "Your vocabulary is not rich!" "Everyone is not rich who wishes to be, messire," rejoined the gypsy; "and yet there are those who wish it very earnestly, so earnestly that they do everything to obtain wealth, even at the risk of the axe and the halter!" "Do you read such things in this gentleman's destiny?" said Lauriane, who had been deeply impressed by the conjurer's warning to herself, and now strove to turn the whole affair into a jest. "Perhaps!" said Monsieur d'Alvimar carelessly; "one never knows what may happen." "But one can find out!" cried La Flèche. "Come who wants to know?" "No one," said the marquis, "no one, if there is anything unpleasant in store for any of us." "Well, neighbor, you have faith, on my word!" said De Beuvre, who did not exactly believe in anything. "You are an excellent customer for any mountebank who chooses to fill your ears with idle tales!" "As you please," rejoined Bois-Doré, "but I cannot help it. I have seen such surprising things! A score of times things that have been predicted have happened to me." "How can you believe that an ignorant idiot like this fellow can look into the future, of which God alone knows the secrets?" said D'Alvimar. "I do not believe in the knowledge of the operator himself," replied Bois-Doré, "except in so far as, by long practice, he knows how to compute numbers, and those numbers are to him like letters in a book whereof the peculiar quality of numbers composes words and phrases." De Beuvre laughed at the marquis, and called upon the gypsy to tell all he knew. D'Alvimar would have been glad of a different result of the discussion, for his incredulity was only feigned; he believed that the devil had a hand in all evil, and he determined inwardly to commend La Flèche to the attention of Monsieur Poulain, to be locked up and burned at the first opportunity. But he was none the less consumed, in spite of himself, with anxiety to open the book of his destiny, and he was strongly impelled, moreover, to assume the rôle of a man free from superstitions, before Madame de Beuvre. La Flèche, being called upon to speak, since he had studied his chart sufficiently, indulged in some serious reflections. He was afraid of the Spaniard. He knew that he ran no risk with people who believed in nothing, for they are not the sort who denounce or accuse sorcerers; and he was too sharp not to understand that, when he tried to withdraw his token, D'Alvimar's object was to escape the revelations which he pretended to despise. He adopted the course to which he was accustomed to resort when he had to do with people who were inclined to become over-excited--he began to make meaningless remarks to everybody.