The Three Musketeers

by Alexandre Dumas

while Milady plunged her lynx eye into the depths of his heart.

It was a rather fine winter day, and a ray of that pale English sun, which gives light but no warmth,

you’d like to be on a good ship, cleaving the waves of that emerald-green sea;

Beneath her apparent emotions, her icy cold-bloodedness never left her.

“My God!” she said, “what a mad fanatic! My God is myself, myself and whoever helps me in my revenge!”

like a serpent coiling and uncoiling its body in order to find out its own strength for itself, she enveloped Felton beforehand in the thousand folds of her inventive imagination.

There was no longer any doubt; Felton was convinced; Felton was hers.

She could thus give way to her passions without being observed. She paced the room with the exaltation of a raving madwoman or a tigress locked in an iron cage. To

Supper was served. Milady felt she had need of strength; she did not know what might happen during that night, which approached menacingly, for big clouds were rolling across the sky, and distant lightning heralded a storm. The storm broke towards ten o’clock in the evening. Milady felt consoled to see nature share the disorder of her heart. Thunder rumbled in the air like the anger in her mind; it seemed that the squall, in passing, disheveled her hair as it did the trees whose branches it bent, stripping away their leaves; she howled like the storm, and her voice was lost in the great voice of nature, which also seemed to wail and despair.

Buckingham wanted to smile a last time, but death arrested his thought, which remained graven on his forehead like a last kiss of love.

The poor woman could in no way suspect the dreadful cruelty that was going on behind the rampart of that pure brow, behind those shining eyes in which she read only concern and compassion.