'A great lady, my cabbage,' said Nicolle solemnly, 'cannot follow the dictates of her heart like a common wench.'
'Why!' exclaimed Jacqueline. 'Methought thou wast all for M. de Landas!'
'So I am, my pigeon, so I am!' rejoined the old woman. 'He is a very distinguished gentleman, who loves thee ardently. But if there's one who is own brother to the King of France....' And old Colle gave an unctuous sigh when she spoke the exalted name.
'Bah!' retorted Jacqueline with a careless shrug of the shoulders. 'There are others too! And no one can force me into a marriage whilst my heart is pledged to M. de Landas.'
'No, no! Thank God for that!' assented Colle piously. 'As for the others ... well! their name is legion ... some of them will be at the banquet to-morrow.... There is the Marquis de Hancourt, a fine-looking youth, and that horrid German prince whom I cannot abide! The English lord hath gone away, so they say, broken-hearted at thy refusal; but there's the Spanish duke, whose name I cannot remember, and Don José, own son to the Emperor.... As for that stranger——' she added with a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders.
'The stranger?' queried Jacqueline lazily. 'What stranger?
'Well, I don't know much about him. But Pierre, feeling crestfallen, did admit that Monseigneur chided him severely for having shown a want of respect to a gentleman who ought to have known better than to pretend to be a street musician.'
But Jacqueline appeared all of a sudden to have lost interest in the conversation. 'Ah!' she said with well-assumed indifference, 'then the street musician of awhile ago was a gentleman in disguise?'
'Aye! so Pierre said—the fool!' quoth old Colle unblushingly. 'Monseigneur was very angry with him when he heard of the altercation with the singer, threatened to speak of the matter to M. de Landas and have Pierre flogged or dismissed for his interference. Then he hinted that the stranger, far from being a street musician, was a foreign seigneur of high degree, even if of scanty fortune.'
'Oh!' commented Jacqueline carelessly.