For a moment Gabrielle paused. The question seemed to have a distressing effect upon her. She echoed his last words: "Between my mother and you." Then she paused, and her lips trembled, but she spoke very steadily: "Henri, you are the first in the world for me." Lagardere sighed. "You have never known a mother, but there are graver rivals to a friendship such as ours than a mother's love." "What rivals can there be to our friendship?" Gabrielle asked. Lagardere answered her sadly enough, though he seemed to smile: "A girl's love for a boy, a maid's love for a man. That pretty gentleman who was here but now, and swore he adored you--if you were noble, could you love such a man as he?" Gabrielle began to laugh, as if all the agitations of the past instants had been dissipated into nothingness by the jest of such a question. "I swear to you, Henri," she said, softly, "that the man I could love would not be at all like Monsieur de Chavernay." In spite of himself, Lagardere gave a sigh of relief. It was something, at least, to know whom Gabrielle de Nevers could not love. He essayed to laugh, too. "What would he be like," he asked--"the wonder whom you would consent to love?" He spoke very merrily, but it racked his heart to speak thus lightly of the love of Gabrielle. He wished that he were a little boy again, that he might hide behind some tree and cry out his grief in bitter tears. But being, as he reminded himself, a weather-beaten soldier of fortune, it was his duty to screen his misery with a grin and to salute his doom with amusement. As for Gabrielle, she came a little nearer to Lagardere, and her eyes were shining very brightly, and her lips trembled a little, and she seemed a little pale in the clear air. "I will try to paint you a picture," she said, hesitatingly, "of the man I"--she paused for a second, and then continued, hurriedly--"of the man I could love. He would be about your height, as I should think, to the very littlest of an inch; and he would be built as you are built, Henri; and his hair would be of your color, and his eyes would have your fire; and his voice would have the sound of your voice, the sweetest sound in the world; and the sweetest sound of that most sweet voice would be when it whispered to me that it loved me." Lagardere looked at her with haggard, happy eyes. He could not misunderstand, and he was happy; he dared not understand, and he was sad. "Gabrielle," he said, softly, "when you were a little maid I used to tell you tales to entertain you. Will you let me spin you a fable now?" The girl said nothing; only she nodded, and she looked at him very fixedly. Lagardere went on: "There was once a man, a soldier of fortune, an adventurous rogue, into whose hands a jesting destiny confided a great trust. That trust was the life of a child, of a girl, of a woman, whom it was his glory to defend for a while with his sword against many enemies."