The servant retired with the message, and in a moment after Henry de La Mothe himself appeared, and informed the messenger that his master was greatly better. He had slept well, he said, during the night; and his surgeons assured him that the wounds which he had received were likely to produce no farther harm than the weakness naturally consequent upon so great a loss of blood as that which he had sustained. Having given this message on his master's account, Henry, on his own, began to question the servant concerning many little particulars of his own family; his father being, as already said, _Fermier_ to Madame de Beaumont. Charles, the Woodman's son, perceiving that the conversation had turned to a subject too interesting soon to be discussed, glided past the Marchioness's servant, placed the note he carried in the hand of the Count's Page, pressed his finger on his lip, in sign that it was to be given privately, and detaching himself from them, without waiting to be questioned, drove back his mule through the least known parts of the forest, and rendered an account to his father of the success of his expedition. "Who can that note be from?" said the Marchioness de Beaumont's servant to Henry de La Mothe. "The boy told me, it came from a lady." "From Mademoiselle de Hauteford, probably," replied the Page, thoughtfully. "I must give it to my master without delay, if he be strong enough to read it. We will talk more another day, good friend;"--and he left him. "From Mademoiselle de Hauteford!" said the man. "Oh, ho!"--and he went home to tell all he knew to Louise, the soubrette. CHAPTER VI. The Marquis de Cinq Mars, the Count de Fontrailles, and King Louis the Thirteenth, all making fools of themselves in their own way. There are some spots on the earth which seem marked out as the scene of extraordinary events, and which, without any peculiar beauty, or other intrinsic quality to recommend them, acquire a transcendent interest, as the theatre of great actions. Such is Chantilly, the history of whose walls might furnish many a lay to the poet, and many a moral to the sage; and even now, by its magnificence and its decay, it offers a new comment on the vanity of splendour, and proves, by the forgotten greatness of its lords, how the waves of time are the true waters of oblivion. Be that as it may, Montmorency, Conde, are names so woven in the web of history, that nothing can tear them out, and these were the lords of Chantilly. But amongst all that its roof has sheltered, no one, perhaps, is more worthy of notice than Louis the Thirteenth: the son of Henry the Fourth and Mary de Medicis, born to an inheritance of high talents and high fortune, with the inspiring incitement of a father's glory, and the powerful support of a people's love.