mmense work. He was about to test her faith; and he
trembled.

He trembled still more when his young betrothed knelt opposite to
him; he trembled, because at the sight of this angel he could not help
feeling all the happiness he might lose. He dared not speak first, and
remained for an instant contemplating her head in the shade, that young
head upon which rested all his hopes. Despite his love, whenever he
looked upon her he could not refrain from a kind of dread at having
undertaken so much for a girl, whose passion was but a feeble reflection
of his own, and who perhaps would not appreciate all the sacrifices
he had made for her--bending the firm character of his mind to the
compliances of a courtier, condemning it to the intrigues and sufferings
of ambition, abandoning it to profound combinations, to criminal
meditations, to the gloomy labors of a conspirator.

Hitherto, in their secret interviews, she had always received each fresh
intelligence of his progress with the transports of pleasure of a child,
but without appreciating the labors of each of these so arduous steps
that lead to honors, and always asking him with naivete when he would be
Constable, and when they should marry, as if she were asking him when he
would come to the Caroussel, or whether the weather was fine. Hitherto,
he had smiled at these questions and this ignorance, pardonable at
eighteen, in a girl born to a throne and accustomed to a grandeur
natural to her, which she found around her on her entrance into life;
but now he made more serious reflections upon this character. And when,
but just quitting the imposing assembly of conspirators, representatives
of all the orders of the kingdom, his ear, wherein still resounded the
masculine voices that had sworn to undertake a vast war, was struck with
the first words of her for whom that war was commenced, he feared for
the first time lest this naivete should be in reality simple levity, not
coming from the heart. He resolved to sound it.

"Oh, heavens! how I tremble, Henri!" she said as she entered the
confessional; "you make me come without guards, without a coach. I
always tremble lest I should be seen by my people coming out of the
Hotel de Nevers. How much longer must I yet conceal myself like a
criminal? The Queen was very angry when I avowed the matter to her; and
whenever she speaks to me of it, 'tis with her severe air that you know,
and which always makes me weep. Oh, I am terribly afra