fied.

Gabrielle, however, flattered though she was by such an honour as a
visit from the King of Navarre, was by no means disposed to smile on the
wooing of "an ugly man, old enough to be my father." And indeed, Henri,
with all the glamour of the hero to aid him, was but a sorry rival for
the handsome and courtly Bellegarde. Now nearing his fortieth year, with
grizzled beard, and skin battered and lined by long years of hard
campaigning, the future King of France had little to appeal to the
romantic eyes of a maid who counted less than half his years; and the
King in turn rode away from the Coeuvres Castle as hopelessly in love
as Bellegarde, but with much less encouragement to return.

But the hero of Ivry and a hundred other battles was no man to submit to
defeat in any lists; and within a few weeks Gabrielle was summoned to
Mantes, where he told her in decisive words that he loved her, and that
no one, Bellegarde or any other, should share her with him. "Indeed!"
she exclaimed, with a defiant toss of the head, "I will be no man's
slave; I shall give my heart to whom I please, and certainly not to any
man who demands it as a right." And within an hour she was riding home
fast as her horse could gallop.

Henri was thunderstruck at such defiance. He must follow her at once and
bring her to reason; but, in order to do so, he must risk his life by
passing through the enemy's lines. Such an adventure, however, was after
his own heart; and disguising himself as a peasant, with a bundle of
faggots on his shoulder, he made his way safely to Coeuvres, where he
presented himself, a pitiable spectacle of rags and poverty, to be
greeted by his lady with shouts of derisive laughter. "Oh dear!" she
gasped between her paroxysms of mirth, "what a fright you look! For
goodness' sake go and change your clothes." But though the King obeyed
humbly, Gabrielle shut herself in her room and declined point-blank to
see him again.

Such devotion, however, expressed in such fashion, did not fail in its
appeal to the romantic girl; and when, a little later, Gabrielle visited
the Royalist army then besieging Chartres, it was a much more pliant
Gabrielle who listened to the King's wooing and whose eyes brightened at
his stories of bravery and danger. Henri might be old and ugly, but he
had at least a charm of manner, a frank, simple manliness, which made
him the idol of his soldiers and in fact of every woman who once came
under its spell. An