ls fell amid
sweet-smelling plants. Green, purple, orange, red, had been the colors
chosen in these dainty retreats for such of the votaries of the Court
of Love as should, from time to time, care to exchange the merry-making
within for the languorous rest without. It was yet too early, however,
for the sprightly devotees to abandon the lively pleasures of the
dance, so that when the duke's fool abstractedly entered the balmy,
crimson nook, at first he thought himself alone.

Around him, carmine, blood-warm flowers exhaled a commingling
redolence; near him a toy-like fountain whispered very softly and
confidentially. Through the foliage the figures moved and moved; on
the air the music fell and rose, thin in orchestration, yet brightly
penetrating in sparkling detail. Buoyant were the violins; sportive
the flutes; all alive the gitterns; blithesome the tripping arpeggios
that crisply fell from the strings of the joyous harps.

The rustling of a gown admonished him he was not alone, and, looking
around, amid the crimson flowers, to his startled gaze, appeared the
face of her of whom he was thinking; above the broad, white brow shone
the radiance of hair, a gold that was almost bronze in that dim light;
through the green tangle of shrubbery, a silver slipper.

"Ah, it is you, fool?" she said languidly. It may be, he contrasted
the indifference of her tones now with the unconscious softness of her
voice when she had addressed him on another occasion--in another
garden; for his face flushed, and he would have turned abruptly, when--

"Oh, you may remain," she added, carelessly. "The duke has but left
me. He received a message that the man hurt in the lists was most
anxious to see him."

Into the whirl of his reflections her words insinuated themselves. Why
had the free baron gone to the trooper? What made his presence so
imperative at the bedside of the soldier that he had abruptly abandoned
the festivities? Surely, more than mere anxiety for the man's welfare.
The jester looked at the princess for the answer to these questions;
but her face was cold, smiling, unresponsive. In the basin of the
fountain tiny fish played and darted, and as his eyes turned from her
to them they appeared as swift and illusive as his own surging fancies.

"The--duke, Madam, is most solicitous about his men," he said, in a
voice which sounded strangely calm.

"A good leader has always in mind the welfare of his soldiers," she
r