"Well, well," said Anne of Austria, concealing by a smile a violent pang which she had just experienced, "do not alarm yourself, young lady, and do not look at things in the worst light immediately."
"Ah, madame, fortune is blind, and I am told there are two hundred tickets."
"Quite as many as that; but you cannot surely forget that there can only be one winner."
"No doubt. But who will that be? can you tell?" said Madame, in despair.
"You remind me that I had a dream last night; my dreams are always good--I sleep so little."
"What was your dream?--But are you suffering?"
"No," said the queen, stifling with wonderful command the torture of a renewed attack of shooting pains in her bosom; "I dreamed that the king won the bracelets."
"You are going to ask me, I think, what the king could possibly do with the bracelets?"
"And you would not add, perhaps, that it would be very fortunate if the king were really to win, for he would be obliged to give the bracelets to some one else."
"In which case I should immediately give them away; for you do not think, I suppose," said the queen, laughing, "that I have put these bracelets up to a lottery from necessity. My object was to give them without arousing any one's jealousy; but if fortune will not get me out of my difficulty--well, I will teach fortune a lesson--and I know very well to whom I intend to offer the bracelets." These words were accompanied by so expressive a smile, that Madame could not resist paying her by a grateful kiss.
"But," added Anne of Austria, "do you not know as well as I do, that if the king were to win the bracelets he would not restore them to me?"
"You mean he would give them to the queen?"
"No; and for the very same reason that he would not give them back again to me; since, if I had wished to make the queen a present of them, I had no need of him for that purpose."
Madame cast a side-glance upon the bracelets, which, in their casket, were dazzlingly exposed to view upon a table close beside her.
"How beautiful they are," she said, sighing. "But stay," Madame continued, "we are quite forgetting that your majesty's dream is nothing but a dream."
"I should be very much surprised," returned Anne of Austria, "if my dream were to deceive me; that has happened to me very seldom."