ed Madame, "I think God will have pity on me."

Scarcely had the words left her lips when the Regent's head fell heavily
on her shoulder, and he began to slip to the floor. A glance showed her
that he was unconscious; and, rushing out of the room, the terrified
Duchesse raced through the dark, deserted corridors of the palace
shrieking for help. When at last help arrived, it came too late. The
Regent had gone to find for himself an answer to the question his lips
had framed a few minutes earlier--"is there any hell--or Paradise?"

CHAPTER XXI

A DELILAH OF THE COURT OF FRANCE

It was a cruel fate that snatched Gabrielle d'Estrees from the arms of
Henri IV., King of France and Navarre, at the moment when her long
devotion to her hero-lover was on the eve of being crowned by the bridal
veil; and for many a week there was no more stricken man in Europe than
the disconsolate King as he wailed in his black-draped chamber, "The
root of my love is dead, and will never blossom again."

No doubt Henri's grief was as sincere as it was deep, for he had loved
his golden-haired Gabrielle of the blue eyes and dimpled baby-cheeks as
he had never loved woman before. It was the passion of a lifetime, the
passion of a strong man in his prime, that fate had thus nipped in the
fullness of its bloom; and its loss plunged him into an abyss of sorrow
and despair such as few men have known.

But with the hero of Ivry no emotion of grief or pleasure ever endured
long. He was a man of erratic, widely contrasted moods--now on the peaks
of happiness, now in the gulf of dejection; one mood succeeding another
as inevitably and widely as the pendulum swings. Thus when he had spent
three seemingly endless months of gloom and solitude, reaction seized
him, and he flung aside his grief with his black raiment. He was still
in the prime of his strength, with many years before him. He would drink
the cup of life, even to its dregs. He had long been weary of the
matrimonial chains that fettered him to Marguerite of Valois. He would
strike them off, and in another wife and other loves find a new lease of
pleasure.

Thus it was with no heavy heart that he turned his back on Fontainebleau
and his darkened room, and fared to Paris to find a new vista of
pleasure opening to him at his palace doors, and his ears full of the
praises of a new divinity who had come, during his absence, to grace his
Court--a girl of such beauty, sprightliness, and wit