“True, dame!” Caroline rose at the suggestion. “I like not this secret chamber. It suited my sad mood, but now I seem to long for air and sunshine. I will go with you to my own room.” They ascended the winding stair, and Caroline seated herself by the window of her own chamber, overlooking the park and gardens of the Château. The huge, sloping forest upon the mountain side, formed, in the distance, with the blue sky above it, a landscape of beauty, upon which her eyes lingered with a sense of freshness and delight. Dame Tremblay left her to her musings, to go, she said, to rouse up the lazy maids and menservants, to straighten up the confusion of everything in the Château after the late long feast. On the great stair she encountered M. Froumois, the Intendant's valet, a favorite gossip of the dame's, who used to invite him into her snug parlor, where she regaled him with tea and cake, or, if late in the evening, with wine and nipperkins of Cognac, while he poured into her ear stories of the gay life of Paris and the bonnes fortunes of himself and master--for the valet in plush would have disdained being less successful among the maids in the servants' hall than his master in velvet in the boudoirs of their mistresses. M. Froumois accepted the dame's invitation, and the two were presently engaged in a melée of gossip over the sayings and doings of fashionable society in Quebec. The dame, holding between her thumb and finger a little china cup of tea well laced, she called it, with Cognac, remarked,--“They fairly run the Intendant down, Froumois: there is not a girl in the city but laces her boots to distraction since it came out that the Intendant admires a neat, trim ankle. I had a trim ankle myself when I was the Charming Josephine, M. Froumois!” “And you have yet, dame,--if I am a judge,” replied Froumois, glancing down with an air of gallantry. “And you are accounted a judge--and ought to be a good one, Froumois! A gentleman can't live at court as you have done, and learn nothing of the points of a fine woman!” The good dame liked a compliment as well as ever she had done at Lake Beauport in her hey-day of youth and beauty. “Why, no, dame,” replied he; “one can't live at Court and learn nothing! We study the points of fine women as we do fine statuary in the gallery of the Louvre, only the living beauties will compel us to see their best points if they have them!” M. Froumois looked very critical as he took a pinch from the dame's box, which she held out to him. Her hand and wrist were yet unexceptionable, as he could not help remarking. “But what think you, really, of our Quebec beauties? Are they not a good imitation of Versailles?” asked the dame.