'Do you think the daughter of Gui de Valogne will ever be a saint?' the Duc de Vannes often said to his wife. He thought that blood would out even beneath the coif of a Carmelite. His wife replied that the Valogne had always kept their women pure, if at the sword's point, and that amongst them there had been more than one canonised; besides, she added, Yseulte was a child both grave and good; she would never know the world or its temptations; she would live and die as a lily did in a convent garden.
'She has her father's blood in her,' he said, 'and he would have suited no cloister but Roissy or Medmenham.'
He believed in very few things, but his one belief was his conviction that the bias of a race goes with it as do its diseases or its excellences. Most racing men are implicit believers in hereditary influence, and the Duc, who had bred winners at Chantilly and at Ascot, did not credit that the daughter of Gui de Valogne would contentedly become a Ste. Catherine or a Soeur Rose.
'Of course you may shut her perforce in a religious house; so might you shut her in a coffin. To be sure, the one murder is legal and the other would not be so,' he said, with some ill-humour, the night after Othmar noticed his young cousin with her long black gloves, her stately curtsy, her sash _à l'enfant_, and her beautiful figure, which had the slimness of a child and the promise of a goddess.
'I believe you are almost in love with her yourself,' said the Duchess.
'I wonder no one else is wholly,' he answered, with petulance; and he wrote to his jeweller in the Rue de la Paix for a locket, a girl's locket; something with pearls. He thought even a Mother Superior could hardly object to pearls.
Yseulte, all unconscious of the perilous honour projected for her by her cousin's lord, passed the whole day up at the little church, arranging the flowers which Othmar had given her in the morning, and others which his men, by his orders, had brought thither in the forenoon. She was happier than she had been since her grandmother had died. A warm human interest had come suddenly into the monotony and solitude of her existence. She worked at the decoration of the little place with ardour and delight. She had never before possessed such flowers as these; the woods had yielded all those which had ever decked the altar of the chapel at Faïel. She had only seen such gorgeous blossoms as these in the glass-house at Millo, where she would no more have dreamed of gathering them than of wearing her cousin's diamonds.