Pauline approached; and the Queen laying her hand gently upon her arm, ran her eye rapidly over her face and figure, every now and then pausing for a moment, and seeming to call memory to her aid, in the comparison she was making between the dead and the living. But suddenly she started back, "_Sainte Vierge!_" cried she, crossing herself, "your dress is all dabbled with blood. What bad omen is this?"
"May it please your Majesty," said the Marchioness, half smiling at the Queen's superstition, for her own strong mind rejected many of the errors of the day, "that blood is only an omen of Pauline's charitable disposition; for in the forest hard by, we came up with a wounded cavalier, and, like a true _demoiselle errante_, Pauline rendered him personal aid, even at the expense of her robe."
"Nay, nay, De Beaumont," said the Queen, "it matters not how it came; it is a bad omen: some misfortune is about to happen. I remember the day before my father died, the Conde de Saldaña came to court with a spot of blood upon the lace of his cardinal; and on that fatal day which----"
The door of the apartment at this moment opened, and Anne of Austria, filled with her own peculiar superstition, stopped in the midst of her speech and turned her eye anxiously towards it, as if she expected the coming of some ghastly apparition. The figure that entered, however, though it possessed a dignity scarcely earthly, and a calm still grace--an almost inanimate composure, rarely seen in beings agitated by human passions, was, nevertheless, no form calculated to inspire alarm.
"Oh, Mademoiselle de Hauteford!" cried the Queen, her face brightening as she spoke, "De Beaumont, you will love her, for that she is one of my firmest friends."
At the name of De Hauteford, Pauline drew up her slight elegant figure to its full height, with a wild start, like a deer suddenly frightened by some distant sound, and drawing her hand across her forehead, brushed back the two or three dark curls which had again fallen over her clear fair brow.
"De Hauteford!" cried Anne of Austria as the young lady advanced, "what has happened? You look pale--some evil is abroad."
"I would not have intruded on your Majesty, or on these ladies," said Mademoiselle de Hauteford with a graceful but cold inclination of the head towards the strangers, "had it not been that Monsieur Seguin, your Majesty's Surgeon, requests the favour of an audience immediately. Nor does he wish to be seen by the common attendants; in truth, he has followed me to the antechamber, where he waits your Majesty's pleasure."