tter,
conceived in the following terms:

"To his Eminence Monseigneur the Cardinal Richelieu, in his camp before
La Rochelle.

"Monseigneur, Let your Eminence be reassured. His Grace the Duke of
Buckingham WILL NOT SET OUT for France.

"MILADY DE ----

"BOULOGNE, evening of the twenty-fifth.

"P.S.--According to the desire of your Eminence, I report to the convent
of the Carmelites at Bethune, where I will await your orders."

Accordingly, that same evening Milady commenced her journey. Night
overtook her; she stopped, and slept at an inn. At five o'clock the next
morning she again proceeded, and in three hours after entered Bethune.
She inquired for the convent of the Carmelites, and went thither
immediately.

The superior met her; Milady showed her the cardinal's order. The abbess
assigned her a chamber, and had breakfast served.

All the past was effaced from the eyes of this woman; and her looks,
fixed on the future, beheld nothing but the high fortunes reserved for
her by the cardinal, whom she had so successfully served without his
name being in any way mixed up with the sanguinary affair. The ever-new
passions which consumed her gave to her life the appearance of those
clouds which float in the heavens, reflecting sometimes azure, sometimes
fire, sometimes the opaque blackness of the tempest, and which leave no
traces upon the earth behind them but devastation and death.

After breakfast, the abbess came to pay her a visit. There is very
little amusement in the cloister, and the good superior was eager to
make the acquaintance of her new boarder.

Milady wished to please the abbess. This was a very easy matter for a
woman so really superior as she was. She tried to be agreeable, and she
was charming, winning the good superior by her varied conversation and
by the graces of her whole personality.

The abbess, who was the daughter of a noble house, took particular
delight in stories of the court, which so seldom travel to the
extremities of the kingdom, and which, above all, have so much
difficulty in penetrating the walls of convents, at whose threshold the
noise of the world dies away.

Milady, on the contrary, was quite conversant with all aristocratic
intrigues, amid which she had constantly lived for five or six years.
She made it her business, therefore, to amuse the good abbess with
the worldly practices of the court of France, mixed with the eccentric
pursuits of the king; she made for h