"You are a pair of wiseheads, truly. It cost the exertions of powerful friends, while I still had some, to get that pittance; were I to move in the matter now, it is more like to lead to its curtailment than extension."
"Yes, but the king admires beauty, and I am beautiful," she said, with a blush that was at once the prettiest, the boldest, and yet the purest thing imaginable; "and I will present your petition myself."
Her father looked at her for a moment with a gaze of inquiring wonder, which changed into a faint, abstracted smile; but he rose abruptly from his seat with a sort of shrug, as if it were chill, and, muttering his favorite exorcism, "Apage sathanas!" walked with a flurried step up and down the room. His face was flushed, and there was something in its expression which forbade her hazarding another word.
It was not until nearly half an hour had elapsed that the Visconte suddenly exclaimed, as if not a second had interposed—
"Well, Lucille, it is not quite impossible; but you need not mention it to Marguerite."
He then signed to her to leave him, intending, according to his wont, to find occupation for his solitary hours in the resources of his library. This library was contained in an old chest; consisted of some score of shabby volumes of all sizes, and was, in truth, a queer mixture. It comprised, among other tomes, a Latin Bible and a missal, in intimate proximity with two or three other volumes of that gay kind which even the Visconte de Charrebourg would have blushed and trembled to have seen in the hands of his child. It resembled thus the heterogeneous furniture of his own mind, with an incongruous ingredient of superinduced religion; but, on the whole, unpresentable and unclean. He took up the well-thumbed Vulgate, in which, of late years, he had read a good deal, but somehow, it did not interest him at that moment. He threw it back again, and suffered his fancy to run riot among schemes more exciting and, alas! less guiltless. His daughter's words had touched an evil chord in his heart—she had unwittingly uncaged the devil that lurked within him; and this guardian angel from the pit was playing, in truth, very ugly pranks with his ambitious imagination.
Lucille called old Marguerite to her bedroom, and there made the astonishing disclosure of the promised visit; but the old woman, though herself very fussy in consequence, perceived no corresponding excitement in her young mistress; on the contrary, she was sad and abstracted.
"Do you remember," said Lucille, after a long pause, "the story of the fair demoiselle of Alsace you used to tell me long ago? How true her lover was, and how bravely he fought through all the dangers of witchcraft and war to find her out again and wed her, although he was a noble knight, and she, as he believed, but a peasant's daughter. Marguerite, it is a pretty story. I wonder if gentlemen are as true of heart now?"
"Ay, my dear, why not? love is love always; just the same as it was of old is it now, and will be while the world wags."
And with this comforting assurance their conference ended.