“I only thought something might happen, brother, if I should ever go to Paris! I was acting a charade in my fancy, and that was the solution of it!” “What was? You would drive the whole Sorbonne mad with your charades and fancies! But I must leave you.” “Good-by, brother,--if you will go. Think of it!--if you want to rise in the world you may yet become a royal gardener like the Marquis de Vandriere!” Her silvery laugh rang out good-humoredly as he descended the stairs and passed out of the house. She sat down in her fauteuil. “Pity Renaud is such a fool!” said she; “yet I am not sure but he is wiser in his folly than I with all my tact and cleverness, which I suspect are going to make a greater fool of me than ever he is!” She leaned back in her chair in a deep thinking mood. “It is growing dark,” murmured she. “Le Gardeur will assuredly be here soon, in spite of all the attractions of Belmont. How to deal with him when he comes is more than I know: he will renew his suit, I am sure.” For a moment the heart of Angélique softened in her bosom. “Accept him I must not!” said she; “affront him I will not! cease to love him is out of my power as much as is my ability to love the Intendant, whom I cordially detest, and shall marry all the same!” She pressed her hands over her eyes, and sat silent for a few minutes. “But I am not sure of it! That woman remains still at Beaumanoir! Will my scheming to remove her be all in vain or no?” Angélique recollected with a shudder a thought that had leaped in her bosom, like a young Satan, engendered of evil desires. “I dare hardly look in the honest eyes of Le Gardeur after nursing such a monstrous fancy as that,” said she; “but my fate is fixed all the same. Le Gardeur will vainly try to undo this knot in my life, but he must leave me to my own devices.” To what devices she left him was a thought that sprang not up in her purely selfish nature. In her perplexity Angélique tied knot upon knot hard as pebbles in her handkerchief. Those knots of her destiny, as she regarded them, she left untied, and they remain untied to this day--a memento of her character and of those knots in her life which posterity has puzzled itself over to no purpose to explain. CHAPTER XX. BELMONT. A short drive from the gate of St. John stood the old mansion of Belmont, the country-seat of the Bourgeois Philibert--a stately park, the remains of the primeval forest of oak, maple, and pine; trees of gigantic growth and ample shade surrounded the high-roofed, many-gabled house that stood on the heights of St. Foye overlooking the broad valley of the St. Charles. The bright river wound like a silver serpent through the flat meadows in the bottom of the valley, while the opposite slopes of alternate field and forest stretched away to the distant range of the Laurentian hills, whose pale blue summits mingled with the blue sky at midday or, wrapped in mist at morn and eve, were hardly distinguishable from the clouds behind them.