m she covered with caresses, saying,
"Excellent news! the king is charmed with my lottery."

"But I," replied Madame, "am not quite so charmed; to see such beautiful
bracelets on any one's arms but yours or mine, is what I cannot
reconcile myself to do."

"Well, well," said Anne of Austria, concealing by a smile a violent pang
which she had just experienced, "do not alarm yourself, young lady, and
do not look at things in the worst light immediately."

"Ah, madame, fortune is blind, and I am told there are two hundred
tickets."

"Quite as many as that; but you cannot surely forget that there can only
be one winner."

"No doubt. But who will that be? can you tell?" said Madame, in despair.

"You remind me that I had a dream last night; my dreams are always
good--I sleep so little."

"What was your dream?--But are you suffering?"

"No," said the queen, stifling with wonderful command the torture of a
renewed attack of shooting pains in her bosom; "I dreamed that the king
won the bracelets."

"The king?"

"You are going to ask me, I think, what the king could possibly do with
the bracelets?"

"Yes."

"And you would not add, perhaps, that it would be very fortunate if the
king were really to win, for he would be obliged to give the bracelets
to some one else."

"To restore them to you, for instance."

"In which case I should immediately give them away; for you do not
think, I suppose," said the queen, laughing, "that I have put these
bracelets up to a lottery from necessity. My object was to give them
without arousing any one's jealousy; but if fortune will not get me out
of my difficulty--well, I will teach fortune a lesson--and I know very
well to whom I intend to offer the bracelets." These words were
accompanied by so expressive a smile, that Madame could not resist
paying her by a grateful kiss.

"But," added Anne of Austria, "do you not know as well as I do, that if
the king were to win the bracelets he would not restore them to me?"

"You mean he would give them to the queen?"

"No; and for the very same reason that he would not give them back again
to me; since, if I had wished to make the queen a present of them, I had
no need of him for that purpose."

Madame cast a side-glance upon the bracelets, which, in their casket,
were dazzlingly exposed to view upon a table close beside her.

"How beautiful they are," she said, sighing. "But stay," Madame
continued, "we are quite forgetting that y