"He must have seen her somewhere, when she did not notice him," he said to himself; "and although he seems a very earnest Catholic, he also seems very much in love with her." He said to himself further that, in the then state of affairs, a Catholic Spanish son-in-law might restore the fortunes of his house and repair the wrong he had done his daughter by joining the ranks of the Reformers. If for no other reason than to give the lie to the Jesuits, who had threatened him, he would have been glad to learn that the Spaniard was of sufficiently good family to pretend to the hand of Lauriane, even if he were only moderately wealthy. Monsieur de Beuvre reasoned like a sceptic. He did not talk so loudly of Montaigne's _Essays_, as Bois-Doré did of _Astrée_, but he fed his mind upon them assiduously, and he read no other book. Bois-Doré, being more straightforward in his politics than his neighbor, would not have reasoned as he did if he had been a father. He was no more attached than he to religion; but of the beliefs of the olden time, he had never laid aside the love of country, and the spirit of the League would never have induced him to trifle with it. He did not suspect the thoughts of his friend, absorbed as he was by his own, and during a quarter of an hour, as if playing at cross purposes, they discussed, without understanding each other, the urgent need of a good marriage for Lauriane. At last light was thrown upon the discussion. "You!" cried De Beuvre in stupefaction, when the marquis had declared himself. "Bless my soul! who the devil could have expected that? I imagined that you were talking in veiled words about your Spaniard, and it seems that you mean yourself! Look you! neighbor, are you in your right mind, and don't you mistake yourself for your grandson?" Bois-Doré gnawed his moustache; but, being accustomed to his friend's jesting, he soon recovered himself, and strove to persuade him that people were mistaken about his age, and that he was not so old as his own father was when he remarried, at the age of sixty, with most successful results. While he was wasting time thus, D'Alvimar was striving to make the most of it. He had succeeded in bringing Madame de Beuvre to a halt under the great yew, whose branches, drooping to the ground, formed a sort of apartment of dark verdure, where one was entirely isolated in the middle of the garden. He began awkwardly enough with extravagant compliments. Lauriane was not on her guard against the poison of praise; she knew little of the refined manners of young men of quality, and was not able to distinguish the false from the true; but, luckily for her, her heart had not yet felt the tedium of solitude, and she was much more of a child than she seemed to be. She considered D'Alvimar's hyperbolical language highly amusing, and laughed at his gallantry with a heartiness that disconcerted him.