, Grand Master!" was Henry's greeting, his voice harsh and strained.
"What do you say to this? What is to be done now?"

"Nothing at all, sire," says Sully, as calm as his master was excited.

"Nothing! What sort of advice is that?"

"The best advice that you can follow, sire. This affair should be talked
of as little as possible, nor should it appear to be of any consequence
to you, or capable of giving you the least uneasiness."

The Queen cleared her throat huskily. "Good advice, Monsieur le Duc,"
she approved him. "He will be wise to follow it." Her voice strained,
almost threatening. "But in this matter I doubt wisdom and he have long
since become strangers."

That put him in a passion, and in a passion he left her to do the
maddest thing he had ever done. In the garb of a courier, and with a
patch over one eye to complete his disguise, he set out in pursuit of
the fugitives. He had learnt that they had taken the road to Landrecy,
which was enough for him. Stage by stage he followed them in that flight
to Flanders, picking up the trail as he went, and never pausing until he
had reached the frontier without overtaking them.

It was all most romantic, and the lady, when she learnt of it, shed
tears of mingled joy and rage, and wrote him impassioned letters in
which she addressed him as her knight, and implored him, as he loved
her, to come and deliver her from the detestable tyrant who held her in
thrall. Those perfervid appeals completed his undoing, drove him mad,
and blinded him to everything--even to the fact that his wife, too, was
shedding tears, and that these were of rage undiluted by any more tender
emotion.

He began by sending Praslin to require the Archduke to order the Prince
of Conde to leave his dominions. And when the Archduke declined with
dignity to be guilty of any such breach of the law of nations, Henry
dispatched Coeuvres secretly to Brussels to carry off thence the
princess. But Maria de' Medici was on the alert, anti frustrated the
design by sending a warning of what was intended to the Marquis Spinola,
as a result of which the Prince de Conde and his wife were housed for
greater security in the Archduke's own palace.

Checkmated at all points, yet goaded further by the letters which he
continued to receive from that most foolish of princesses, Henry took
the wild decision that to obtain her he would invade the Low Countries
as the first step in the execution of that design of a war wi