“Monseigneur will not forget. ‘The Cock with the Spurs of Gold,’ in the woods----”

He gave her matted head a pat. It was a pity she was not pretty, this wench, for she had a buxom figure. “A soldier,” he said lightly, “does not love wise women, Yvonne, he loves only the young and the fair and he wins them not by sorcery, but by his sword.”

“Monseigneur is a soldier?” she asked with grave interest.

“Yes, a soldier of France.”

“My lover too is a soldier, but not as Monseigneur. Ah!” she whispered, “if all the nobles of France were as Monseigneur there would be no unhappy women, no robbers, and no poor.”

André left her there. His heart was gay again though his purse was empty, for he had made a woman happy. And as he rode through the woods he could hear her singing as she had sung when he had seen her first on the sleek back of her spotted cow. And all the way to Paris that song of a peasant wench softly caressed his spirit, for it clinked gaily to the echoes of the soul as might have clinked the golden spurs of the cock in the woods of Versailles, and it was fresh with the eternal freshness of spring and the immortal dreams of youth. CHAPTER IV

A LOVER’S TRICK

THE March sun was setting on the hamlet of La Rivière, in the pleasant land of Touraine--Touraine the fit home of so many noble châteaux, the cradle of so many of the proudest traditions and the most inspiring memories of the romance of love and chivalry in the history of France.

André was standing in the churchyard of the hamlet, but it was not at the landscape that he knew so well that he was looking, nor even up the slope beyond, where the great Château de Beau Séjour shot its towers and pointed turrets through its encircling domain of wood. Ten leagues away in the dim distance lay Nérac, the poverty-stricken home from which he took his title, and whose meagre patrimony encumbered with the debts of his ancestors and his own barely sufficed to provide a living for the widowed mother to whom that morning he had said good-bye and whom the English in the Low Countries might decide he should never see again.

Yet it was not of his mother that he was thinking, still less of the enchantress of the forest whose identity he had discovered--one Mademoiselle d’Étiolles she had proved to be, “La Petite d’Étiolles,” as that gay Lothario the Duc de Richelieu called her, the daughter of a Farmer-General, a _bourgeoisie_ notorious for 

 Prev. P 21/227 next