is in her life, Henriette's stout heart did not
fail her for a moment. "The King may take my life, if he pleases," she
said. "Everybody will say that he killed his wife; for I was Queen
before the Tuscan woman came on the scene at all." None knew better than
she that she could afford thus to put on a bold front. Henri was still
her slave, to whom her little finger was more than his crown; and she
knew that in his hands both her liberty and her life were safe. And thus
it proved; for before she had spent many weeks in the Monastery of
Beaumont-les-Tours, its doors were flung open for her, and the first
news she heard was that her father was a free man, while her brother's
death-sentence had been commuted to a few years in the Bastille.

Thus Henriette returned to the turbulent life of the palace--the daily
routine of quarrels and peacemaking with the King, and undisguised
hostility from the Queen, through all of which Henri's heart still
remained hers. "How I long to have you in my arms again," he writes,
when on a hunting excursion, which had led him to the scene of their
early romance. "As my letter brings back the memory of the past, I know
you will feel that nothing in the present is worth anything in
comparison. This, at least, was my feeling as I walked along the roads I
so often traversed in the old days on my journey to your side. When I
sleep I dream of you; when I wake my thoughts are all of you." He sends
her a million kisses, and vows that all he asks of life is that she
shall always love him entirely and him alone.

One would have thought that such a conquest of a King and such triumph
over a Queen would have gratified the ambition of the most exacting of
women. But the Marquise de Verneuil seems to have found small
satisfaction in her victories. When she was not provoking quarrels with
Henri, which roused him to such a pitch of anger that at times he
threatened to strike her, she received his advances with a coldness or a
sullen acquiescence calculated to chill the most ardent lover. In other
moods she would drive him to despair by declaring that she had long
ceased to love him, and that all she wanted from him was a dowry to
carry in marriage to one or other of several suitors who were dying for
her hand.

But Madame's day of triumph was drawing much nearer to an end than she
imagined. The end, in fact, came with dramatic suddenness when Henri
first set eyes on the radiantly lovely Charlotte de Montmoren