.
Heigh-ho! hour there is none,
Love of my heart, but thou art my light;
Never forsaking,
Noon or day-breaking,
Midnights of sorrow thy comforts make bright.
Heigh-ho! Love is my life,
Live I in loving and love I to live:
Heigh-ho!----"

"Monsieur La Mothe, Monsieur La Mothe, have you deceived us all these
days?"

Down went the lute with a clang which jarred its every string into
discord, and La Mothe sprang to his feet.

"Deceived you, mademoiselle! How?"

"That first night--I do not like to remember it even now, but Monsieur
Villon told us you were both poet and singer, but you denied it. And
now I hear you singing----"

"Not singing, mademoiselle."

"Singing," she persisted, with a pretty emphasis which La Mothe found
very pleasant. "We shall have a new play to-night. A Court of High
Justice, and Monsieur La Mothe arraigned for defrauding Amboise of a
pleasure these ten days. I shall prosecute, Charles must be judge, and
your sentence will be to sing every song you know."

"Then I shall escape lightly; I know so few."

"There! You have confessed, and your punishment must begin at once.
Villon was right: Amboise is dull; sing for me, Monsieur La Mothe."

"But," protested La Mothe, "Villon was wrong as well as right in what
he told you that night."

"What? A minstrel who wanders France with his knapsack and his lute
and yet cannot sing?" If the raillery yet remained in the gay voice,
it was a raillery which shifted its significance from pleasant badinage
to something deeper, and the tender mouth which La Mothe was so sure
could never lend itself to philandering lost its tenderness. More than
once he had caught just such expression when the perilous ground of the
relationships between father and son had been trodden upon in an
attempt to justify the King. Then it had been impersonal, now he was
reminded of his first night in Amboise, when her cold suspicion had
been frankly unveiled. But the hardening of the face was only for a
moment. "Truly, now," she went on, "have you never made verses?"

"Very bad ones, mademoiselle."

"A poet tells the truth! The skies will fall! But perhaps it is not
the truth; perhaps you are as unjust to your verses as you are to your
singing." Seating herself in a low chair, she looked up at him with a
dangerous but unconscious kindness in her eyes. "Now sit there in that
window-seat and let me judge. With the sun behind you yo