riating in the rich,
forbidden pasture. The triumph of Cleopatra over Antony, by Le Brun, was
a great favorite with Angelique, because of a fancied, if not a real,
resemblance between her own features and those of the famous Queen
of Egypt. Portraits of favorite friends, one of them Le Gardeur de
Repentigny, and a still more recent acquisition, that of the Intendant
Bigot, adorned the walls, and among them was one distinguished for its
contrast to all the rest--the likeness, in the garb of an Ursuline, of
her beautiful Aunt Marie des Meloises, who, in a fit of caprice some
years before, had suddenly forsaken the world of fashion, and retired to
a convent.

The proud beauty threw back her thick golden tresses as she scanned her
fair face and magnificent figure in the tall Venetian mirror. She drank
the intoxicating cup of self-flattery to the bottom as she compared
herself, feature by feature, with every beautiful woman she knew in New
France. The longer she looked the more she felt the superiority of her
own charms over them all. Even the portrait of her aunt, so like her in
feature, so different in expression, was glanced at with something like
triumph spiced with content.

"She was handsome as I!" cried Angelique. "She was fit to be a queen,
and made herself a nun--and all for the sake of a man! I am fit to be a
queen too, and the man who raises me nighest to a queen's estate gets
my hand! My heart?" she paused a few moments. "Pshaw!" A slight quiver
passed over her lips. "My heart must do penance for the fault of my
hand!"

Petrified by vanity and saturated with ambition, Angelique retained
under the hard crust of selfishness a solitary spark of womanly feeling.
The handsome face and figure of Le Gardeur de Repentigny was her
beau-ideal of manly perfection. His admiration flattered her pride. His
love, for she knew infallibly, with a woman's instinct, that he loved
her, touched her into a tenderness such as she felt for no man besides.
It was the nearest approach to love her nature was capable of, and she
used to listen to him with more than complacency, while she let her
hand linger in his warm clasp while the electric fire passed from one
to another and she looked into his eyes, and spoke to him in those sweet
undertones that win man's hearts to woman's purposes.

She believed she loved Le Gardeur; but there was no depth in the soil
where a devoted passion could take firm root. Still she was a woman
keenly ali