, as we say in Spain."

"Who are you, sir?" asked the fool.

The minstrel laughed, and answered in his natural voice.

"Don't you know me, _mon ami_?" he said, gaily. "What a jest this will
be at court? How it will amuse the king--"

"Caillette!" exclaimed the _plaisant_, loudly. "Caillette!"

CHAPTER XXI

THE DESERTED HUT

"Himself!" laughed the minstrel. "Did I not tell you I should become a
Spanish troubadour?" Then, reaching out his hand, he added seriously:
"Right pleased am I to meet you. But how came you here?"

"I have fled from the keep of the old castle, where I lay charged with
heresy," answered the jester, returning the hearty grip.

"The keep!" exclaimed Caillette in surprise. "You are fortunate not to
have been brought to trial," he added, thoughtfully. "Few get through
that seine, and his Holiness, the pope, I understand, has ordered the
meshes made yet smaller."

They had paused on the brow of a hill, commanding the view of road and
tavern. Dazed, the young girl had listened to the greeting between the
two men. This ragged, beard-begrown troubadour, the graceful, elegant
Caillette of Francis' court? It seemed incredible. At the same time,
through her mind passed the memory of the _plaisant's_ reiterated
exclamation in prison: "Caillette--in Spain!"--words she had attributed
to fever, not imagining they had any foundation in fact.

But now this unexpected encounter abruptly dispelled her first
supposition and opened a new field for speculation. Certainly had he
been on a mission of some kind, somewhere, but what his errand she
could not divine. A diplomat in tatters, serving a fellow-jester.
Fools had oft intruded themselves in great events ere this, but not
those who wore the motley; heretofore had the latter been content with
the posts of entertainers, leaving to others the more precarious
offices of intrigant.

But if she was surprised at Caillette's unexpected presence and
disguise, that counterfeit troubadour had been no less amazed to see
her, the joculatrix of the princess, in the mean garb of a wayside
_ministralissa_, wandering over the country like one born to the
nomadic existence. That she had a nature as free as air and the spirit
of a gipsy he well believed, but that she would forego the security of
the royal household for the discomforts and dangers of a vagrant life
he could not reconcile to that other part of her character which he
knew must shrink from