was a perfect horsewoman. De Guyon said to himself twenty times as he rode with her on the morning after his coming to the château that she would surely break her neck. Somehow, he found that he was more anxious for her safety than for his own. She looked so girlish with her golden-brown hair coiled loosely on her neck, and her tiny hands controlling a great horse that might have carried a commander. And no difficulty of the road was too great for her nerve or her daring. He shuddered again and again when she rode blindly through the labyrinthine way of copse thicket, or galloped wildly where the sward was soft and the way was open.
There were moments when he said that she must certainly be killed. And he himself was no mountebank in the saddle.
Even to a man accustomed to the gaudy pictures of life at Court, the scene was no unworthy one. The green coats and feathered hats of the woodlanders, the changing beauties of the forest; the baying of the hounds, the winding blast of horns, the thud of hoofs upon the rich green turf braced his mind to exhilaration in the sport. And when to this there was added that fascination which the company of Gabrielle de Vernet already cast upon him, his heart went out to the spirit of the morning, and all the burning fevers of intrigue and ambition and debauchery seemed to leave him.
At the first she had ridden with the others, with a fearlessness which many a man might have envied. But when they had galloped some miles almost upon the outskirts of the forest, it appeared to de Guyon that she was drawing away from the chase, and seeking to plunge into the darker places of the woods. The note of the horns died down in the distance; the voice of the hounds were faint echoes in the hollows; and still she rode on through groves of close set pines and tangles of bramble; over swards carpeted with violets and meadows of soft sand; by dark pools and bubbling brooks. When at last she drew rein it was at a thicket's edge in a grass glade odorous with the perfume of sweet flowers; there one of her own serving men came out to greet her.
"Our ride is over, Monsieur de Guyon," said she, jumping lightly from her horse, "and here we should find our breakfast. Did you think that I was going to lose you in the forest?"
She was blushing deeply; but it was with the blush of a young girl's health. It seemed to de Guyon that she had left at the château that stately dignity of speech and bearing which he had remarked at their first meeting. Nor did he know in which mood he found her the more charming. While he had thought overnight that there was no woman at Versailles to be compared to her as the graceful mistress of a household, he now said that this girlish freedom was unsurpassable in its charm and attractiveness. And her riding-dress showed her pretty figure to exceeding advantage; the quaint round hat in which she had gone to the hunt gave piquancy to the freshness of her young face. He said to himself that the wonder was, not that the king now desired to see her, but that she had not been lured to the palace long ago. Yet he trembled at the thought of her being there; found himself in some way posing mentally as her protector from ills which it seemed a crime to think upon.
The nook in which they were to breakfast was the one she called her bower. In part it was of nature's making; in part the work of her own gardeners, who had trained honey-suckle about the little wooden pavilion and had almost smothered it in roses. Here, in the depths of the glen, a clear pool of water caught the sun's rays streaming through a canopy of boughs and branches, and showed gold and silver fish basking in the warmth, or feeding on the ripe green weeds which flourished on the pebbly bed. A little balcony, pleasantly shaded by a roof of flowering creeper, was built over the pond, and the breakfast to which de Guyon had been invited was spread out upon a little wooden table on this balcony. He saw at once that only two chairs were set; and for a moment he had hopes of this discovery. Was it possible that Gabrielle de Vernet was going to make love to him?