Would you like me to send them to your house this very day ?" "Oh, no!" replied the young girl; "pray keep them yourself, sire; my house is far too small to accommodate such visitors." "In that case you shall have Hampton Court to put the cartoons in." "Be less generous, sire, and learn to love a little while longer, that is all I have to ask you." "I shall never cease to love you; is not that enough ?" "You are smiling, sire." "Do you wish me to weep ?" "No; but I should like to see you a little more melancholy." "Thank Heaven, I have been so long enough; fourteen years of exile, poverty, and misery, I think I may well regard it as a debt discharged; besides, melancholy makes people look so plain." "Far from that--for look at the young Frenchman." "What! the Vicomte de Bragelonne?
are you smitten too?
By Heaven, they will all grow mad over him one after the other; but he, on the contrary, has a reason for being melancholy." "Why so ?" "Oh, indeed! you wish me to betray state secrets, do you ?" "If I wish it, you must do so, for you told me you were quite ready to do everything I wished." "Well, then, he is bored in his own country.

Does that satisfy you ?" "Bored ?" "Yes, a proof that he is a simpleton; I allow him to fall in love with Miss Mary Grafton, and he feels bored.

Can you believe it ?" "Very good; it seems, then, that if you were to find Miss Lucy Stewart indifferent to you, you would console yourself by falling in love with Miss Mary Grafton." "I don't say that; in the first place, you know that Mary Grafton does not care for me; besides, a man can only console himself for a lost affection by the discovery of a new one.

Again, however, I repeat, the question is not of myself, but of that young man.

One might almost be tempted to call the girl he has left behind him a Helen--a Helen before the little ceremony she went through with Paris, of course." "He has left some one, then ?" "That is to say, some one has left _him_." "Poor fellow! so much the worse!" "Why do you mean by 'so much the worse' ?" "Why not?
why did he leave ?" "Do you think it was of his own wish or will that he left ?" "Was he obliged to leave, then ?" "He left Paris under orders, my dear Stewart; and prepare to be surprised--by express orders of the king." "Ah! I begin to see, now." "At least say nothing at all about it." "You know very well that I am just as discreet as anybody else.