“No, don’t be alarmed, although it is to a lady that I am going to present you, and I am anxious that you should love her ——­ "

The young man looked at the count with a certain uneasiness, but at a smile from Athos he was quickly reassured.

“How old is she?” inquired the Vicomte de Bragelonne.

“My dear Raoul, learn, once for all, that that is a question which is never asked.  When you can find out a woman’s age by her face, it is useless to ask it; when you cannot do so, it is indiscreet.”

“Is she beautiful?”

“Sixteen years ago she was deemed not only the prettiest, but the most graceful woman in France.”

This reply reassured the vicomte.  A woman who had been a reigning beauty a year before he was born could not be the subject of any scheme for him.  He retired to his toilet.  When he reappeared, Athos received him with the same paternal smile as that which he had often bestowed on D’Artagnan, but a more profound tenderness for Raoul was now visibly impressed upon his face.

Athos cast a glance at his feet, hands and hair —­ those three marks of race.  The youth’s dark hair was neatly parted and hung in curls, forming a sort of dark frame around his face; such was the fashion of the day.  Gloves of gray kid, matching the hat, well displayed the form of a slender and elegant hand; whilst his boots, similar in color to the hat and gloves, confined feet small as those of a boy twelve years old.

“Come,” murmured Athos, “if she is not proud of him, she must be hard to please.”

It was three o’clock in the afternoon.  The two travelers proceeded to the Rue Saint Dominique and stopped at the door of a magnificent hotel, surmounted with the arms of De Luynes.

“’Tis here,” said Athos.

He entered the hotel and ascended the front steps, and addressing a footman who waited there in a grand livery, asked if the Duchess de Chevreuse was visible and if she could receive the Comte de la Fere?

The servant returned with a message to say, that, though the duchess had not the honor of knowing Monsieur de la Fere, she would receive him.

Athos followed the footman, who led him through a long succession of apartments and paused at length before a closed door.  Athos made a sign to the Vicomte de Bragelonne to remain where he was.

The footman opened the door and announced Monsieur le Comte de la Fere.

Madame de Chevreuse, whose name appears so often in our story “The Three Musketeers,” without her actually having appeared in any scene, was still a beautiful woman.  Although about forty-four or forty-five years old, she might have passed for thirty-five.  She still had her rich fair hair; her large, animated, intelligent eyes, so often opened by intrigue, so often closed by the blindness of love.  She had still her nymph-like form, so that when her back was turned she still was not unlike the girl who had jumped, with Anne of Austria, over the moat of the Tuileries in 1563.  In all other respects she was the same mad creature who threw over her amours such an air of originality as to make them proverbial for eccentricity in her family.