"I like harboring lords no better than harboring wizards. And I know
not, of the two, which is the more like to bring us to the gallows,"
replied Tirechair, taking up his halbert. "I will go my rounds over by
Champfleuri; God protect us, and send me to meet some pert jade out in
her bravery of gold rings to glitter in the shade like a glow-worm!"

Jacqueline, alone in the house, hastily went up to the unknown lord's
room to discover, if she could, some clue to this mysterious business.
Like some learned men who give themselves infinite pains to complicate
the clear and simple laws of nature, she had already invented a chaotic
romance to account for the meeting of these three persons under her
humble roof. She hunted through the chest, examined everything, but
could find nothing extraordinary. She saw nothing on the table but a
writing-case and some sheets of parchment; and as she could not read,
this discovery told her nothing. A woman's instinct then took her into
the young man's room, and from thence she descried her two lodgers
crossing the river in the ferry boat.

"They stand like two statues," said she to herself. "Ah, ha! They are
landing at the Rue du Fouarre. How nimble he is, the sweet youth! He
jumped out like a bird. By him the old man looks like some stone saint
in the Cathedral.--They are going to the old School of the Four Nations.
Presto! they are out of sight.--And this is where he lives, poor
cherub!" she went on, looking about the room. "How smart and winning he
is! Ah! your fine gentry are made of other stuff than we are."

And Jacqueline went down again after smoothing down the bed-coverlet,
dusting the chest, and wondering for the hundredth time in six months:

"What in the world does he do all the blessed day? He cannot always be
staring at the blue sky and the stars that God has hung up there like
lanterns. That dear boy has known trouble. But why do he and the old man
hardly ever speak to each other?"

Then she lost herself in wonderment and in thoughts which, in her
woman's brain, were tangled like a skein of thread.

The old man and his young companion had gone into one of the schools for
which the Rue du Fouarre was at that time famous throughout Europe. At
the moment when Jacqueline's two lodgers arrived at the old School des
Quatre Nations, the celebrated Sigier, the most noted Doctor of Mystical
Theology of the University of Paris, was mounting his pulpit in a
spacious low room on a