"Sans doute; but they also sometimes revenge. Poor little Bluette you may safely turn over; but Madame la Baronne won't so easily be jilted."
Vaughan laughed. "Oh, I'm not going to break her heart. Don't you know, Gaston, 'on a bien de la peine à rompre, même quand on ne s'aime plus."
"I shouldn't have said you found it so," smiled De Concressault, "for you change your loves as you change your gloves. La chevelure dorée will be the next, eh?"
"Poor little thing!" said Ernest, bitterly. "I wish her a better fate."
He went to call on la chevelure dorée, nevertheless, the morning after, and found her in the salon alone, greatly to his surprise and pleasure. Nina Gordon was pretty even in the morning—as Byron says—and she was much more, she was fascinating, and as perfectly demonstrative and natural as any peasant girl out of the meadows of Arles, ignorant of the magic words toilette, cosmétique, and crinoline.
She received him with evident pleasure and perfect unreserve, which even this daring and skeptical Lion could not twist or contort into boldness, and began to talk fast and gaily.
"Do I like Paris?" she said, in answer to his question. "Oh yes; or at least I should, if I could see it differently. I detest sight-seeing, crowding one's brains with pictures, statues, palaces, Holy Families jostling Polinchinelle, races, mixing up with grand masses, Versailles, clouding St. Cloud—the Trianon rattled through in five minutes—all in inextricable muddle. I should like to see Paris at leisure, with some one with whom I had a 'rapport,' my thoughts undisturbed, and my historical associations fresh and fervent."
"I wish I were honored with the office of your guide," said Ernest, smiling. "Do you think you would have a 'rapport' with me?"
She smiled in return. "Yes, I think I should. I cannot tell why. But as it is, my warmest souvenir of Condé is chilled by the offer of an ice, and my tenderest thought of Louise de la Vallière is shivered with the suggestion of dinner."
Vaughan laughed. "Bravo!" thought he. "Thank God this is no tame English icicle. I would give much," he said, "to be able to take my cousin's place, and show you Paris. We would have no such vulgar gastronomical interruptions; we would go through it all perfectly. I would make you hear the very whispers with which La Vallière, under the old oaks of St. Germain, unknowingly, told her love to Louis. In the forest glades of St. Cloud you should see Cinq-Mars and the Royal Hunt riding out in the chasse de nuit; in the gloomy walls of the prisons you should hear André Chénier reciting his last verses, and see Egalité completing his last toilet. The glittering 'Cotillons' on the terraces of Versailles, the fierce canaille surging through the salons of the Tuileries, the Templars dying in the green meadows at the back of St. Antoine—they should all rise up for you under my incantations."