"This is your devoted friend," said a French lord.

"He is a cat to me now," said Bertram, who detested our hearthrug pets.

Parolles was finally let go, but henceforth he felt like a sneak, and
was not addicted to boasting.

We now return to France with Helena, who had spread a report of her
death, which was conveyed to the Dowager Countess at Rousillon by Lafeu,
a lord who wished to marry his daughter Magdalen to Bertram.

The King mourned for Helena, but he approved of the marriage proposed
for Bertram, and paid a visit to Rousillon in order to see it
accomplished.

"His great offense is dead," he said. "Let Bertram approach me."

Then Bertram, scarred in the cheek, knelt before his Sovereign, and said
that if he had not loved Lafeu's daughter before he married Helena, he
would have prized his wife, whom he now loved when it was too late.

"Love that is late offends the Great Sender," said the King. "Forget
sweet Helena, and give a ring to Magdalen."

Bertram immediately gave a ring to Lafeu, who said indignantly, "It's
Helena's!"

"It's not!" said Bertram.

Hereupon the King asked to look at the ring, and said, "This is the ring
I gave to Helena, and bade her send to me if ever she needed help. So
you had the cunning to get from her what could help her most."

Bertram denied again that the ring was Helena's, but even his mother
said it was.

"You lie!" exclaimed the King. "Seize him, guards!" but even while they
were seizing him, Bertram wondered how the ring, which he thought Diana
had given him, came to be so like Helena's. A gentleman now entered,
craving permission to deliver a petition to the King. It was a petition
signed Diana Capilet, and it begged that the King would order Bertram to
marry her whom he had deserted after winning her love.

"I'd sooner buy a son-in-law at a fair than take Bertram now," said
Lafeu.

"Admit the petitioner," said the King.

Bertram found himself confronted by Diana and her mother. He denied
that Diana had any claim on him, and spoke of her as though her life was
spent in the gutter. But she asked him what sort of gentlewoman it
was to whom he gave, as to her he gave, the ring of his ancestors now
missing from his finger?

Bertram was ready to sink into the earth, but fate had one crowning
generosity reserved for him. Helena entered.

"Do I see reality?" asked the King.

"O pardon! pardon!" cried Bertram.

She held up his ancestral ring. "Now that I have