"I look like a dreamy sheep," she would say, smiling.

Laurence, who talked little, seemed not so much dreamy as dormant.

But, did any important circumstance arise, the hidden Judith was revealed, sublime; and circumstances had, unfortunately, not been wanting.
At thirteen years of age, Laurence, after the events already related, was an orphan living in a house opposite to the empty space where so recently had stood one of the most curious specimens in France of sixteenth-century architecture, the hotel Cinq-Cygne.

Monsieur d'Hauteserre, her relation, now her guardian, took the young heiress to live in the country at her chateau of Cinq-Cygne.

That brave provincial gentleman, alarmed at the death of his brother, the Abbe d'Hauteserre, who was shot in the open square as he was about to escape in the dress of a peasant, was not in a position to defend the interests of his ward.