f your desires, where your
bark, long tossing in cross seas, and beating against adverse winds,
would cast anchor and be at rest. The phrase sounded poetical if
enigmatical, but it pleased me somehow; what did it mean, Bigot? I have
puzzled over it many times since--pray tell me!"

Angelique turned her eyes like two blazing stars full upon him as if to
search for every trace of hidden thought that lurked in his countenance.

"I meant what I said, Angelique: that in you I had found the pearl of
price which I would rather call mine than wear a king's crown."

"You explain one enigma by another. The pearl of price lay there before
you and you picked it up! It had been the pride of its former owner, but
you found it ere it was lost. What did you with it, Bigot?"

The Intendant knew as well as she the drift of the angry tide, which
was again setting in full upon him, but he doubted not his ability to
escape. His real contempt for women was the lifeboat he trusted in,
which had carried himself and fortunes out of a hundred storms and
tempests of feminine wrath.

"I wore the precious pearl next my heart, as any gallant gentleman
should do," replied he blandly; "I would have worn it inside my heart
could I have shut it up there."

Bigot smiled in complacent self-approval at his own speech. Not so
Angelique! She was irritated by his general reference to the duty of
a gallant gentleman to the sex and not to his own special duty as the
admirer of herself.

Angelique was like an angry pantheress at this moment. The darts of
jealousy just planted by her two friends tore her side, and she felt
reckless both as to what she said and what she did. With a burst of
passion not rare in women like her, she turned her wrath full upon him
as the nearest object. She struck Bigot with her clenched hand upon the
breast, exclaiming with wild vehemence,--

"You lie! Francois Bigot, you never wore me next your heart, although
you said so! You wear the lady of Beaumanoir next your heart. You have
opened your heart to her after pledging it to me! If I was the pearl
of price, you have adorned her with it--my abasement is her glory!"
Angelique's tall, straight figure stood up, magnified with fury as she
uttered this.

The Intendant stepped back in surprise at the sudden attack. Had the
blow fallen upon his face, such is human nature, Bigot would have
regarded it as an unpardonable insult, but falling upon his breast, he
burst out in a loud l