"I will warrant," he said, "that you have dreamed of a love more real than that which Monsieur de Bois-Doré parades before you; of such a love as you could inspire in a man of heart, even if you could not yourself feel it." No sooner had he uttered these commonplace words of challenge, in a tone to which he was able to give a melting quality and which he deemed most persuasive, than Lauriane suddenly withdrew her arm from his, turned pale and stepped back. "What is it, in heaven's name?" he exclaimed, trying to recover her arm. "Nothing, nothing," she said, trying hard to smile. "I saw a snake among the rushes and it frightened me; I am going to call my father to kill it." And she hastened toward Monsieur de Beuvre, leaving D'Alvimar beating the rushes on the sloping bank of the moat with his cane, in search of the accursed reptile. But no reptile, beautiful or ugly, made its appearance, and when he looked after Madame de Beuvre, he saw her just going from the garden into the courtyard. "There's a sensitive plant," he thought as he watched her! "whether she really was frightened by a snake, or whether my words caused this sudden disturbance. Ah! why have not queens and princesses, who hold exalted destinies in their hands, the amorous sincerity of these little country dames!" While his vanity thus accounted for Lauriane's emotion, she had gone up to Charlotte d'Albret's chapel, not to pray--she did not often visit that Catholic oratory, ordinarily closed as the sanctuary of a venerable memory--but to make sure of a fact which had caused her a violent shock. In that little chapel there was a portrait, blackened and discolored by the lapse of years, which was never shown to any one, but was preserved there, where it had been found, out of respect for those articles which had belonged to the saint of the family. Lauriane had seen the portrait but twice in her life. Once by chance, when an old woman employed to clean the chapel had opened the sort of closet in which it was kept, in order to dust it. Lauriane was a child at that time. The portrait had frightened her, although she could not tell why. The second time, not long before, her father had told her the poor duchess's story, with certain details, furnished by tradition, and had said to her: "And yet our saintly ancestress did not abhor _that monster_. Whether she had actually loved him for a moment before she knew of the crimes with which his hands were stained, or whether she made it her duty to pray for him, impelled solely by Christian charity, she had his portrait in her chapel." Thereupon Lauriane, having learned whose terrifying features were represented in that old painting, had felt a desire to see it again. She had scrutinized it carefully, coolly, and had made a mental vow that she would never marry a man who bore the faintest resemblance to that terrible face.