eye, the white paths that
led back to the grand terrace of the Palace.

Her fevered imagination played tricks in keeping with her fear: more
than once she fancied she saw the shadowy form of a beautiful woman
walking on the other side of Bigot next his heart! It was the form
of Caroline bearing a child in one arm, and claiming, by that supreme
appeal to a man's heart, the first place in his affections.

The figure sometimes vanished, sometimes reappeared in the same place,
and once and the last time assumed the figure and look of Our Lady of
St. Foye, triumphant after a thousand sufferings, and still ever bearing
the face and look of the lady of Beaumanoir.

Emerging at last from the dim avenue into the full light, where a
fountain sent up showers of sparkling crystals, the figure vanished, and
Angelique sat down on a quaintly-carved seat under a mountain-ash, very
tired, and profoundly vexed at all things and with everybody.

A servant in gorgeous livery brought a message from the ballroom to the
Intendant.

He was summoned for a dance, but he would not leave Angelique, he said.
But Angelique begged for a short rest: it was so pleasant in the garden.
She would remain by the fountain. She liked its sparkling and splashing,
it refreshed her; the Intendant could come for her in half an hour; she
wanted to be alone; she felt in a hard, unamiable mood, she said, and he
only made her worse by stopping with her when others wanted him, and he
wanted others!

The Intendant protested, in terms of the warmest gallantry, that he
would not leave her; but seeing Angelique really desired at the present
moment to be alone, and reflecting that he was himself sacrificing too
much for the sake of one goddess, while a hundred others were adorned
and waiting for his offerings, he promised in half an hour to return for
her to this spot by the fountain, and proceeded towards the Palace.

Angelique sat watching the play and sparkle of the fountain, which
she compared to her own vain exertions to fascinate the Intendant, and
thought that her efforts had been just as brilliant, and just as futile!

She was sadly perplexed. There was a depth in Bigot's character which
she could not fathom, a bottomless abyss into which she was falling and
could not save herself. Whichever way she turned the eidolon of
Caroline met her as a bar to all further progress in her design upon the
Intendant.

The dim half-vision of Caroline which she had seen