It would have been worth one's while to look at that game of bowls. There was something in the scene at once comical and melancholy. Jacque was cool, but very clumsy. Gabriel, a better player, but all bewildered, agitated, trembling. While the little daughter of nobility, in drugget petticoat, her arms resting on the window-sill, looked out upon the combatants with such an air of unaffected and immense superiority as the queen of beauty in the gallery of a tilting-yard might wear while she watched the feats of humble yeomen and villein archers. Sometimes leaning forward with a grave and haughty interest; sometimes again showing her teeth, like little coronels of pearl, in ringing laughter, in its very unrestrainedness as haughty as her gravity. The spirit of the noblesse, along with its blood, was undoubtedly under that slender drugget bodice. Small suspicion had that commanding little damsel that the bipeds who were amusing her with their blunders were playing for love of her. Audacity like that was not indeed to be contemplated. "Well, Gabriel has won, and I am glad of it, for I think he is the better lad of the two," she said, with the prettiest dogmatism conceivable. "What shall we give you, Gabriel, now that you have won the game? let me see." "Nothing, Mademoiselle--nothing, I entreat," faltered poor Gabriel, trembling in a delightful panic. "Well, but you are hot and tired, and have won the game beside. Marguerite shall give you some pears and a piece of bread." "I wish nothing, Mademoiselle," said poor Gabriel, with a melancholy gush of courage, "but to die in your service." "Say you so?" she replied, with one of those provokingly unembarrassed smiles of good-nature which your true lovers find far more killing than the cruelest frown; "it is the speech of a good villager of Charrebourg. Well, then, you shall have them another time." "But, as your excellence is so good as to observe, I have won the game," said Gabriel, reassured by the sound of his own voice, "and to say I should have something as--as a token of victory, I would ask, if Mademoiselle will permit, for my poor old aunt at home, who is so very fond of those flowers, just one of the white roses which Mademoiselle has in her hand; it will give her so much pleasure." "The poor old woman! Surely you may pluck some fresh from the bush; but tell Marguerite, or she will be vexed." "But, Mademoiselle, pardon me, I have not time: one is enough, and I think there are none so fine upon the tree as that; besides, I know she would like it better for having been in Mademoiselle's hand." "Then let her have it by all means," said Lucille; and so saying, she placed the flower in Gabriel's trembling fingers. Had he yielded to his impulse, he would have received it kneeling. He was intoxicated with adoration and pride; he felt as if at that moment he was the sultan of the universe, but her slave.