I could not answer this, but I looked at him in fear; for, as it was impossible that the Princess de Conde could be here, I saw no alternative but to think him smitten with madness. The extravagance of the passion which he had entertained for her, and the wrath into which the news of her flight with her young husband had thrown him, to say nothing of the depression under which he had since suffered, rendered the idea not so unlikely as it now seems. At any rate, I was driven for a moment to entertain it; and gazed at him in silence, a prey to the most dreadful apprehensions. We stood in a narrow ride, bordered by evergreens, with which that part of the forest is planted; and but for the songs of the birds the stillness would have been absolute. On a sudden the King removed his eyes from me, and, walking his horse a pace or two along the ride, uttered a cry of joy. He pointed to the ground. "We are right!" he said. "There are her tracks! Come! We will overtake her yet!" I looked, and saw the fresh prints of a horse's shoes, and felt a great weight roll off my mind, for at least he had seen someone. I no longer hesitated to fall in with his humour, but, riding after him, kept at his elbow until he reached the end of the ride. Here, a vista opening right and left, and the ground being hard and free from tracks, we stood at a loss; until the King, whose eyesight was always of the keenest, uttered an exclamation, and started from me at a gallop. I followed more slowly, and saw him dismount and pick up a glove, which, even at that distance, he had discerned lying in the middle of one of the paths. He cried, with a flushed face, that it was Madame de Conde's; and added: "It has her perfume--her perfume, which no one else uses!" I confess that this so staggered me that I knew not what to think; but, between sorrow at seeing my master so infatuated and bewilderment at a riddle that grew each moment more perplexing, I sat gaping at Henry like a man without counsel. However, at the moment, he needed none, but, getting to his saddle as quickly as he could, he began again to follow the tracks of the horse's feet, which here were visible, the path running through a beech wood. The branches were still bare, and the shining trunks stood up like pillars, the ground about them being soft. We followed the prints through this wood for a mile and a half or more, and then, with a cry, the King darted from me, and, in an instant, was racing through the wood at break-neck speed.