"In which case I should immediately give them away; for you do not think, I suppose," said the queen, laughing, "that I have put these bracelets up to a lottery from necessity. My object was to give them without arousing any one's jealousy; but if fortune will not get me out of my difficulty—well, I will teach fortune a lesson—and I know very well to whom I intend to offer the bracelets." These words were accompanied by so expressive a smile, that Madame could not resist paying her by a grateful kiss.
"But," added Anne of Austria, "do you not know as well as I do, that if the king were to win the bracelets he would not restore them to me?"
"You mean he would give them to the queen?"
"No; and for the very same reason that he would not give them back again to me; since, if I had wished to make the queen a present of them, I had no need of him for that purpose."
Madame cast a side-glance upon the bracelets, which, in their casket, were dazzlingly exposed to view upon a table close beside her.
"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?"