Thereupon, a bright flush spread over her whole face, her eyes sparkled, she smiled as if some magician had touched a spring unknown to this automaton-like figure, seemingly endowed with intelligence, and the mechanism of which had drawn the lightning glance from her eyes, the glowing flush on her cheek, and the sparkling smile to her lips.  The moment after, she again subsided into her calm and statue-like stillness.  The prince, however, approached her, and by the passionate tone of his conversation, seemed as if he had succeeded in warming into animation his new conquest.  Thereupon Diana, who occasionally glanced at the face of a magnificent clock suspended over the prince’s head, against the opposite side of the wall to where she was seated, seemed to make an effort over herself, and with her lips bedecked with smiles took a more active part in the conversation.

Henri, concealed in his leafy covert, wrung his hands in despair, and cursed the whole creation in the utter wretchedness of his sore distress.  It seemed to him monstrous, almost iniquitous, that this woman, so pure and rigidly inflexible, should yield herself so unresistingly to the prince, because he was a prince, and abandon herself to love because it was offered within the precincts of a palace.  His horror at Remy was so extreme that he could have slain him without remorse, in order to see whether so great a monster had the blood and heart of a man in him.  In such paroxysms of rage and contempt did Henri pass the time during the supper, which to the Duc d’Anjou was so full of rapture and delight.

Diana sang.  The prince, inflamed by wine, and by his passionate discourse, rose from the table for the purpose of embracing Diana.  Every drop of blood seemed to curdle in Henri’s veins.  He put his hand to his side to see if his sword were there, and then thrust it into his breast in search of a dagger.  Diana, with a strange smile, which most assuredly had never, until that moment, had its counterpart on any face, stopped the duke as he was approaching her.

“Will you allow me, monseigneur,” she said, “before I rise from the table, to share with your royal highness one of those tempting-looking peaches.”

And with these words she stretched out her hand toward a basket of gold filagree work, in which twenty peaches were tastefully arranged, and took one.

Then, taking from her girdle a beautiful little dagger, with a silver blade and a handle of malachite, she divided the peach into two portions, and offered one of them to the prince, who seized it and carried it eagerly to his lips, as though he would thus have kissed Diana’s.

This impassioned action produced so deep an impression on himself, that a cloud seemed to obscure his sight at the very moment he bit into the fruit.  Diana looked at him with her clear steady gaze, and her fixed immovable smile.

Remy, leaning his back against a pillar of carved wood, also looked on with a gloomy expression of countenance.