"Gratitude for the service I rendered makes you kind, Mademoiselle de Broglie----" "Gratitude? Well, be it so," said she, with her dark French eyes so full of expression, that my heart beat quick and wildly. At such times, was it not strange that Aurora's image with her soft, bright English beauty always came to memory? Yet, what was Aurora Gauntlet to me, or I to her? So I thrust the obtrusive idea--the little romance of the lace handkerchief--aside, and gradually my whole heart became filled with a deep and desperate love for Jacqueline, a love I dared scarcely acknowledge to myself. Instead of replying to her last remark, I again lifted her hand and bent my lip over it; then she immediately rose and left me, followed by Angelique. Had I exhibited too much eagerness--had I offended her? My heart sank at the idea. Anticipating with hope and fear the morrow, dreaming sadly or tenderly over yesterday, ever communing with himself when alone, and abstracted when with all save one, what a miserable dog is your young lover! When one grows older, and becomes a veteran in the service of King Cupid, one learns to take these matters more quietly, like an old soldier under fire. "Hope makes us live," says a writer; it is the secret spirit that lures us toward the future, to some mysterious time beyond the present. "Hope and sleep," says a proverb, "are the foes of care;" but hope follows the impulses of imagination rather than the convictions of reason, and so hope is the lover's grand ally. I remained alone on the terrace till the red sun declined beyond the dun, dark mountains, while the breeze of evening rippled the bosom of the reedy lake, and waved the white water-lilies that floated there; nor did I retire to my lurking-place--the pretty room which Angelique had relinquished to me--until the pale crescent moon shone sharply out, from amid the deep blue of the south-western sky, and two great ravens, whose eyry was in the rocks, had winged their way across the water, from the girouettes of the chateau, where they were wont to sit and croak for hours. I have more than once seen Angelique sign herself with the cross, on seeing those two ravens, which she assured me were no other than the doomed souls of King Grallon and his daughter--for all the land of Brittany teems with legends of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Did Jacqueline suspect the passion that now preyed upon me? By her knowing smiles, Angelique certainly _did_, and would no doubt inform her of it; then if she deemed me presumptuous, or felt the passion distasteful, would she not at least shun, if she did not expel me from the chateau?