treme gentleness, though noble,
had something of the stupidity of the little animal. "I look like a
dreamy sheep," she would say, smiling. Laurence, who talked little,
seemed not so much dreamy as dormant. But, did any important
circumstance arise, the hidden Judith was revealed, sublime; and
circumstances had, unfortunately, not been wanting.

At thirteen years of age, Laurence, after the events already related,
was an orphan living in a house opposite to the empty space where
so recently had stood one of the most curious specimens in France
of sixteenth-century architecture, the hotel Cinq-Cygne. Monsieur
d'Hauteserre, her relation, now her guardian, took the young heiress to
live in the country at her chateau of Cinq-Cygne. That brave provincial
gentleman, alarmed at the death of his brother, the Abbe d'Hauteserre,
who was shot in the open square as he was about to escape in the dress
of a peasant, was not in a position to defend the interests of his
ward. He had two sons in the army of the princes, and every day, at the
slightest unusual sound, he believed that the municipals of Arcis were
coming to arrest him. Laurence, proud of having sustained a siege and of
possessing the historic whiteness of her swan-like ancestors, despised
the prudent cowardice of the old man who bent to the storm, and dreamed
only of distinguishing herself. So, she boldly hung the portrait of
Charlotte Corday on the walls of her poor salon at Cinq-Cygne, and
crowned it with oak-leaves. She corresponded by messenger with her
twin cousins, in defiance of the law, which punished the act, when
discovered, with death. The messenger, who risked his life, brought back
the answers. Laurence lived only, after the catastrophes at Troyes,
for the triumph of the royal cause. After soberly judging Monsieur and
Madame d'Hauteserre (who lived with her at the chateau de Cinq-Cygne),
and recognizing their honest, but stolid natures, she put them outside
the lines of her own life. She had, moreover, too good a mind and too
sound a judgment to complain of their natures; always kind, amiable,
and affectionate towards them, she nevertheless told them none of her
secrets. Nothing forms a character so much as the practice of constant
concealment in the bosom of a family.

After she attained her majority Laurence allowed Monsieur d'Hauteserre
to manage her affairs as in the past. So long as her favorite mare was
well-groomed, her maid Catherine dressed to please