Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/186

 Montmirail brought into relief by the lamp-light in her room. She must have heard his step in the street, he thought, for she had risen and was looking earnestly out into the darkness; but from some cause or another, at the instant the door in the garden wall closed behind him, she shrank back and disappeared.

His heart beat high. Could she have expected him? Could she know intuitively why he was there to-night? Was it possible she would run down and grant him a meeting in the garden? The thought was rapture! Yet perhaps with all its intoxication, he scarcely loved her so dearly as he had done a moment before, as he did a moment after, when he actually distinguished a white dress flitting along the terrace at the farthest corner of the building.

Then indeed he forgot duty, danger, exile, uncertainty, the future, the past, everything but the intense happiness of that moment. He was conscious of the massive trees, the deep shadows, the black clusters of shrubs, the dusky outlines of the huge indistinct building traversed here and there by a broad shimmer of light, the stars above his head, the crescent moon, the faint whisper of leaves, the drowsy perfume of flowers, but only because of her presence who turned the whole to a glimpse of fairyland. He stole towards the terrace, treading softly, keeping carefully in the shadow of the trees. So intent was he, and so cautious, that he never observed Cerise return to her post of observation.

She had resumed it, however, at the very moment when the Musketeer, having advanced some ten paces with the crouching stealthy gait of a Red Indian drawing on his game, stopped short—like the savage when he has gone a step too far—rigid, motionless, scarcely breathing, every faculty called up to watch.

The attention of Mademoiselle de Montmirail was aroused at the same moment by the same cause.

It is scarcely necessary to observe that the Duke of Orleans, Regent of France, was no less ambitious of distinction in the fields of love than of war. That in the one, though falling far short of his heroic ancestor, whom he so wished to resemble, his prowess was not below the average, scandal itself must admit; but that, if experience