m eyes which sparkled
beneath strongly-marked brows, and particularly from her teeth, which
seemed to shine like pearls between her red coral lips. Her every
movement seemed the accent of a sunny nature; she did not walk--she
bounded.

The other, she who was writing, looked at her turbulent companion with
an eye as limpid, as pure, and as blue as the azure of the day. Her
hair, of a shaded fairness, arranged with exquisite taste, fell in silky
curls over her lovely mantling cheeks; she passed across the paper a
delicate hand, whose thinness announced her extreme youth. At each burst
of laughter that proceeded from her friend, she raised, as if annoyed,
her white shoulders in a poetical and mild manner, but they were wanting
in that richfulness of mold that was likewise to be wished in her arms
and hands.

"Montalais! Montalais!" said she at length, in a voice soft and
caressing as a melody, "you laugh too loud--you laugh like a man! You
will not only draw the attention of messieurs the guards, but you will
not hear Madame's bell when Madame rings."

This admonition neither made the young girl called Montalais cease to
laugh nor gesticulate. She only replied: "Louise, you do not speak as
you think, my dear; you know that messieurs the guards, as you call
them, have only just commenced their sleep, and that a cannon would not
waken them; you know that Madame's bell can be heard at the bridge
of Blois, and that consequently I shall hear it when my services are
required by Madame. What annoys you, my child, is that I laugh while you
are writing; and what you are afraid of is that Madame de Saint-Remy,
your mother, should come up here, as she does sometimes when we laugh
too loud, that she should surprise us, and that she should see that
enormous sheet of paper upon which, in a quarter of an hour, you have
only traced the words _Monsieur Raoul_. Now, you are right, my dear
Louise, because after these words, 'Monsieur Raoul', others may be put
so significant and incendiary as to cause Madame Saint-Remy to burst out
into fire and flames! _Hein!_ is not that true now?--say."

And Montalais redoubled her laughter and noisy provocations.

The fair girl at length became quite angry; she tore the sheet of paper
on which, in fact, the words "Monsieur Raoul" were written in good
characters; and crushing the paper in her trembling hands, she threw it
out of the window.

"There! there!" said Mademoiselle de Montalais; "there is