"How beautiful they are," she said, sighing. "But stay," Madame continued, "we are quite forgetting that your majesty's dream is nothing but a dream." "I should be very much surprised," returned Anne of Austria, "if my dream were to deceive me; that has happened to me very seldom." "We may look upon you as a prophetess, then." "I have already said, that I dream but very rarely; but the coincidence of my dream about this matter, with my own ideas, is extraordinary! it agrees so wonderfully with my own views and arrangements." "What arrangements do you allude to?" "That you will win the bracelets, for instance." "In that case, it will not be the king." "Oh!" said Anne of Austria, "there is not such a very great distance between his majesty's heart and your own; for, are not you his sister, for whom he has a great regard? There is not, I repeat, so very wide a distance, that my dream can be pronounced false on that account. Come, let us reckon up the chances in its favor." "I will count them." "In the first place, we will begin with the dream. If the king wins, he is sure to give you the bracelets." "I admit that is one." "If you win them, they are yours." "Naturally! that may be admitted also." "Lastly;--if Monsieur were to win them!" "Oh!" said Madame, laughing heartily, "he would give them to the Chevalier de Lorraine." Anne of Austria laughed as heartily as her daughter-in-law; so much so, indeed, that her sufferings again returned, and made her turn suddenly pale in the very midst of her enjoyment. "What is the matter?" inquired Madame, almost terrified. "Nothing, nothing; a pain in my side. I have been laughing too much. We were at the fourth chance, I think." "I cannot see a fourth." "I beg your pardon; I am not excluded from the chance of winning, and if I be the winner, you are sure of me." "Oh! thank you, thank you!" exclaimed Madame. "I hope you look upon yourself as one whose chances are good, and that my dream now begins to assume the solid form of reality." "Yes, indeed; you give me both hope and confidence," said Madame, "and the bracelets won in this manner, will be a hundred times more precious to me." "Well! then, good-by, until this evening." And the two princesses separated. Anne of Austria, after her daughter-in-law had left her, said to herself, as she examined the bracelets, "They are, indeed, precious; since, by their means, this evening, I shall have won over a heart to my side, and, at the same time, shall have guessed a secret." Then, turning toward the deserted recess in her room, she said, addressing vacancy--"Is it not thus that you would have acted, my poor Chevreuse? Yes, yes; I know it is." And, like a perfume of days gone by, her youth, her imagination, and her happiness, seemed to return to her with the echo of this invocation. CHAPTER VII. THE LOTTERY.