"Is it a woman or a man? I will only ask that question, Dame Dodier,"

said the crone, turning upon her a pair of green, inquisitive eyes.

"It is a woman, and so of course you will help me. Our sex for the bottom of all mischief, Mere Malheur! I do not know what women are made for except to plague one another for the sake of worthless men!"

The old crone laughed a hideous laugh, and playfully pushed her long fingers into the ribs of La Corriveau. "Made for! quotha! men's temptation, to be sure, and the beginning of all mischief!"

"Pretty temptations you and I are, Mere Malheur!" replied La Corriveau, with a scornful laugh.

"Well, we were pretty temptations once! I will never give up that! You must own, Dame Dodier, we were both pretty temptations once!"

"Pshaw! I wish I had been a man, for my part," replied La Corriveau, impetuously. "It was a spiteful cross of fate to make me a woman!"

"But, Dame Dodier, I like to be a woman, I do. A man cannot be half as wicked as a woman, especially if she be young and pretty," said the old woman, laughing till the tears ran out of her bleared eyes.

"Nay, that is true, Mere Malheur; the fairest women in the world are ever the worst! fair and false! fair and false! they are always so. Not one better than another. Satan's mark is upon all of us!" La Corriveau looked an incarnation of Hecate as she uttered this calumny upon her sex.

"Ay, I have his mark on my knee, Dame Dodier," replied the crone. "See here! It was pricked once in the high court of Arras, but the fool judge decided that it was a mole, and not a witch-mark! I escaped a red gown that time, however. I laughed at his stupidity, and bewitched him for it in earnest. I was young and pretty then! He died in a year, and Satan sat on his grave in the shape of a black cat until his friends set a cross over it. I like to be a woman, I do, it is so easy to be wicked, and so nice! I always tell the girls that, and they give me twice as much as if I had told them to be good and nice, as they call it! Pshaw!

Nice! If only men knew us as we really are!"

"Well, I do not like women, Mere Malheur," replied La Corriveau; "they sneer at you and me and call us witch and sorceress, and they will lie, steal, kill, and do worse themselves for the sake of one man to-day, and cast him off for sake of another to-morrow! Wise Solomon found only one good woman in a thousand; the wisest man now finds not one in a worldful! It were better all of us were dead, Mere Malheur; but pour me out a glass of wine, for I am tired of tramping in the dark to the house of that gay lady I told you of."

Mere Malheur poured out a glass of choice Beaume from a dame-jeanne which she had received from a roguish sailor, who had stolen it from his ship.

"But you have not told me who she is, Dame Dodier," replied Mere Malheur, refilling the glass of La Corriveau.

"Nor will I yet. She is fit to be your mistress and mine, whoever she is; but I shall not go again to see her."

And La Corriveau did not again visit the house of Angelique. She had received from her precise information respecting the movements of the Intendant. He had gone to the Trois Rivieres on urgent affairs, and might be absent for a week.

Angelique had received from Varin, in reply to her eager question for news, a short, falsified account of the proceedings in the Council relative to Caroline and of Bigot's indignant denial of all knowledge of her.

Varin, as a member of the Council, dared not reveal the truth, but would give his familiars half-hints, or tell to others elaborate lies, when pressed for information. He did not, in this case, even hint at the fact that a search was to be made for Caroline. Had he done so, Angelique would herself have given secret information to the Governor to order the search of Beaumanoir, and thus got her rival out of the way without trouble, risk, or crime.

But it was not to be. The little word that would have set her active spirit on fire to aid in the search for Caroline was not spoken, and her thoughts remained immovably fixed upon her death.

But if Angelique had been misled by Varin as to what had passed at the Council, Mere Malheur, through her intercourse with a servant of Varin, had learned the truth. An eavesdropping groom had overheard his master and the Intendant conversing on the letters of the Baron and La Pompadour. The man told his sweetheart, who, coming with some stolen sweetmeats to Mere Malheur, told her, who in turn was not long in imparting what she had heard to La Corriveau.

La Corriveau did not fail to see that, should Angelique discover that her rival was to be searched for, and taken to France if found, she would at once change her mind, and Caroline would be got rid of without need of her interference. But La Corriveau had got her hand in the dish.

She was not one to lose her promised reward or miss the chance of so cursed a deed by any untimely avowal of what she knew.

So Angelique was doomed to remain in ignorance until too late. She became the dupe of her own passions and the dupe of La Corriveau, who carefully concealed from her a secret so important.

Bigot's denial in the Council weighed nothing with her. She felt certain that the lady was no other than Caroline de St. Castin. Angelique was acute enough to perceive that Bigot's bold assertion that he knew nothing of her bound him in a chain of obligation never to confess afterwards aught to the contrary. She eagerly persuaded herself that he would not regret to hear that Caroline had died by some sudden and, to appearance, natural death, and thus relieved him of a danger, and her of an obstacle to her marriage.

Without making a full confidant of Mere Malheur, La Corriveau resolved to make use of her in carrying out her diabolical scheme. Mere Malheur had once been a servant at Beaumanoir. She knew the house, and in her heyday of youth and levity had often smuggled herself in and out by the subterranean passage which connected the solitary watchtower with the vaults of the Chateau. Mere Malheur knew Dame Tremblay, who, as the Charming Josephine, had often consulted her upon the perplexities of a heart divided among too many lovers.

The memory of that fragrant period of her life was the freshest and pleasantest of all Dame Tremblay's experience. It was like the odor of new-mown hay, telling of early summer and frolics in the green fields.

She liked nothing better than to talk it all over in her snug room with Mere Malheur, as they sat opposite one another at her little table, each with a cup of tea in her hand, well laced with brandy, which was a favorite weakness of them both.

Dame Tremblay was, in private, neither nice nor squeamish as to the nature of her gossip. She and the old fortune-teller, when out of sight of the rest of the servants, had always a dish of the choicest scandal fresh from the city.

La Corriveau resolved to send Mere Malheur to Beaumanoir, under the pretence of paying a visit to Dame Tremblay, in order to open a way of communication between herself and Caroline. She had learned enough during her brief interview with Caroline in the forest of St. Valier, and from what she now heard respecting the Baron de St. Castin, to convince her that this was no other than his missing daughter.

"If Caroline could only be induced to admit La Corriveau into her secret chamber and take her into her confidence, the rest--all the rest,"

muttered the hag to herself, with terrible emphasis, "would be easy, and my reward sure. But that reward shall be measured in my own bushel, not in yours, Mademoiselle des Meloises, when the deed is done!"

La Corriveau knew the power such a secret would enable her to exercise over Angelique. She already regarded the half of her reputed riches as her own. "Neither she nor the Intendant will ever dare neglect me after that!" said she. "When once Angelique shall be linked in with me by a secret compact of blood, the fortune of La Corriveau is made. If the death of this girl be the elixir of life to you, it shall be the touchstone of fortune forever to La Corriveau!"

Mere Malheur was next day despatched on a visit to her old gossip, Dame Tremblay. She had been well tutored on every point, what to say and how to demean herself. She bore a letter to Caroline, written in the Italian hand of La Corriveau, who had learned to write well from her mother, Marie Exili.

The mere possession of the art of writing was a rarity in those days in the class among whom she lived. La Corriveau's ability to write at all was a circumstance as remarkable to her illiterate neighbors as the possession of the black art which they ascribed to her, and not without a strong suspicion that it had the same origin.

Mere Malheur, in anticipation of a cup of tea and brandy with Dame Tremblay, had dressed herself with some appearance of smartness in a clean striped gown of linsey. A peaked Artois hat surmounted a broad-frilled cap, which left visible some tresses of coarse gray hair and a pair of silver ear-rings, which dangled with every motion of her head. Her shoes displayed broad buckles of brass, and her short petticoat showed a pair of stout ankles enclosed in red clocked stockings. She carried a crutched stick in her hand, by help of which she proceeded vigorously on her journey.

Starting in the morning, she trudged out of the city towards the ferry of Jean Le Nocher, who carefully crossed himself and his boat too as he took Mere Malheur on board. He wafted her over in a hurry, as something to be got rid of as quickly as possible.

Mere Malheur tramped on, like a heavy gnome, through the fallen and flying leaves of the woods of Beaumanoir, caring nothing for the golden, hazy sky, the soft, balmy air, or the varicolored leaves--scarlet, yellow, and brown, of every shade and tinge--that hung upon the autumnal trees.

A frosty night or two had ushered in the summer of St. Martin, as it was called by the habitans,--the Indian summer,--that brief time of glory and enchantment which visits us like a gaudy herald to announce the approach of the Winter King. It is Nature's last rejoicing in the sunshine and the open air, like the splendor and gaiety of a maiden devoted to the cloister, who for a few weeks is allowed to flutter like a bird of paradise amid the pleasures and gaieties of the world, and then comes the end. Her locks of pride are shorn off; she veils her beauty, and kneels a nun on the cold stones of her passionless cell, out of which, even with repentance, there comes no deliverance.

Mere Malheur's arrival at Beaumanoir was speedily known to all the servants of the Chateau. She did not often visit them, but when she did there was a hurried recital of an Ave or two to avert any harm, followed by a patronizing welcome and a rummage for small coins to cross her hand withal in return for her solutions of the grave questions of love, jealousy, money, and marriage, which fermented secretly or openly in the bosoms of all of them. They were but human beings, food for imposture, and preyed on by deceivers. The visit of Mere Malheur was an event of interest in both kitchen and laundry of the Chateau.

Dame Tremblay had the first claim, however, upon this singular visitor.

She met her at the back door of the Chateau, and with a face beaming with smiles, and dropping all dignity, exclaimed,--

"Mere Malheur, upon my life! Welcome, you wicked old soul! you surely knew I wanted to see you! come in and rest! you must be tired, unless you came on a broom! ha! ha! come to my room and never mind anybody!"

This last remark was made for the benefit of the servants who stood peeping at every door and corner, not daring to speak to the old woman in the presence of the housekeeper, but knowing that their time would come, they had patience.

The housekeeper, giving them a severe look, proceeded to her own snug apartment, followed by the crone, whom she seated in her easiest chair and proceeded to refresh with a glass of cognac, which was swallowed with much relish and wiping of lips, accompanied by a little artificial cough. Dame Tremblay kept a carafe of it in her room to raise the temperature of her low spirits and vapors to summer heat, not that she drank, far from it, but she liked to sip a little for her stomach's sake.

"It is only a thimbleful I take now and then," she said. "When I was the Charming Josephine I used to kiss the cups I presented to the young gallants, and I took no more than a fly! but they always drank bumpers from the cup I kissed!" The old dame looked grave as she shook her head and remarked, "But we cannot be always young and handsome, can we, Mere Malheur?"

"No, dame, but we can be jolly and fat, and that is what we are! You don't quaff life by thimblefuls, and you only want a stout offer to show the world that you can trip as briskly to church yet as any girl in New France!"

The humor of the old crone convulsed Dame Tremblay with laughter, as if some invisible fingers were tickling her wildly under the armpits.

She composed herself at last, and drawing her chair close to that of Mere Malheur, looked her inquiringly in the face and asked, "What is the news?"

Dame Tremblay was endowed with more than the ordinary curiosity of her sex. She knew more news of city and country than any one else, and she dispensed it as freely as she gathered. She never let her stock of gossip run low, and never allowed man or woman to come to speak with her without pumping them dry of all they knew. A secret in anybody's possession set her wild to possess it, and she gave no rest to her inordinate curiosity until she had fished it out of even the muddiest waters.

The mystery that hung around Caroline was a source of perpetual irritation to the nerves of Dame Tremblay. She had tried as far as she dared by hint and suggestion to draw from the lady some reference to her name and family, but in vain. Caroline would avow nothing, and Dame Tremblay, completely baffled by a failure of ordinary means to find out the secret, bethought herself of her old resource in case of perplexity, Mere Malheur.

For several days she had been brooding over this mode of satisfying her curiosity, when the unexpected visit of Mere Malheur set aside all further hesitation about disobeying the Intendant's orders not to inquire or allow any other person to make inquisition respecting Caroline.

"Mere Malheur, you feel comfortable now!" said she. "That glass of cognac has given you a color like a peony!"

"Yes, I am very comfortable now, dame! your cognac is heavenly: it warms without burning. That glass is the best news I have to tell of to-day!"