oak-leaves.  She corresponded by messenger with her twin cousins, in defiance of the law, which punished the act, when discovered, with death.  The messenger, who risked his life, brought back the answers.  Laurence lived only, after the catastrophes at Troyes, for the triumph of the royal cause.  After soberly judging Monsieur and Madame d’Hauteserre (who lived with her at the chateau de Cinq-Cygne), and recognizing their honest, but stolid natures, she put them outside the lines of her own life.  She had, moreover, too good a mind and too sound a judgment to complain of their natures; always kind, amiable, and affectionate towards them, she nevertheless told them none of her secrets.  Nothing forms a character so much as the practice of constant concealment in the bosom of a family.

After she attained her majority Laurence allowed Monsieur d’Hauteserre to manage her affairs as in the past.  So long as her favorite mare was well-groomed, her maid Catherine dressed to please her, and Gothard the little page was suitably clothed, she cared for nothing else.  Her thoughts were aimed too high to come down to occupations and interests which in other times than these would doubtless have pleased her.  Dress was a small matter to her mind; moreover her cousins were not there to see her.  She wore a dark-green habit when she rode, and a gown of some common woollen stuff with a cape trimmed with braid when she walked; in the house she was always seen in a silk wrapper.  Gothard, the little groom, a brave and clever lad of fifteen, attended her wherever she went, and she was nearly always out of doors, riding or hunting over the farms of Gondreville, without objection being made by either Michu or the farmers.  She rode admirably well, and her cleverness in hunting was thought miraculous.  In the country she was never called anything but “Mademoiselle” even during the Revolution.

Whoever has read the fine romance of “Rob Roy” will remember that rare woman for whose making Walter Scott’s imagination abandoned its customary coldness,—­Diana Vernon.  The recollection will serve to make Laurence understood if, to the noble qualities of the Scottish huntress you add the restrained exaltation of Charlotte Corday, surpassing, however, the charming vivacity which rendered Diana so attractive.  The young countess had seen her mother die, the Abbe d’Hauteserre shot down, the Marquis de Simeuse and his wife executed; her only brother had died of his wounds; her two cousins serving in Conde’s army might be killed at any moment; and, finally, the fortunes of the Simeuse and the Cinq-Cygne families had been seized and wasted by the Republic without being of any benefit to the nation.  Her grave demeanor, now lapsing into apparent stolidity, can be readily understood.