mmed eyes the pairing of the birds--showed a
proud front of sufferance, while inly her heart played a wild tune. Not
a crying girl, nor one capable of any easy utterance, she could do no
more than stand still, and wonder why she was most glad when most
wretched. She ought to have felt the taint, to love the man who had
slain her brother; she might have known despair: she did neither. She
sat or stood, or lay in her bed, and pressed to her heart with both
hands the words that said, 'Never doubt me, Jehane,' or 'Ma mye, I shall
come to you.' When he came, as he surely would, he would find her a
wife--ah, let him come, let him come in his time, so only she saw him
again!

March went out in dusty squalls, and April came in to the sound of the
young lamb's bleat. Willow-palm was golden in the hedges when the King
of England's men filled Normandy, and Gilles de Gurdun, having been
healed of his wounds, rode towards Rouen at the head of his levy. He
went not without an understanding with Saint-Pol that he should have his
sister on Palm Sunday in the church of Gisors. They could not marry at
Saint-Pol-la-Marche, because Gilles was on his service and might not win
so far; nor could they have married before he went, because of his
ill-treatment at the hands of the Bearnais. Of this Gilles had made
light. 'He got worse than he gave,' he told Saint-Pol. 'I left him dead
in the wood.'

'Would you see Jehane, Gilles?' Saint-Pol had asked him before he went
out. 'She is in her turret as meek as a mouse.'

'Time enough for that,' said Gilles quietly. 'She loves me not. But I,
Eustace, love her so hot that I have fear of myself. I think I will not
see her.'

'As you will,' said Saint-Pol. 'Farewell.'

In Gisors, then a walled town, trembling like a captive at the knees of
a huge castle, there was a long grey church which called Saint Sulpice
lord. It stood in a little square midway between the South Gate and the
citadel, a narrow oblong place where they held the cattle market on
Tuesdays, flagged and planted with pollard-limes. The west door of Saint
Sulpice, resting on a stepped foundation, formed a solemn end to this
humble space, and the great gable flanked by turrets threatened the
huddled tenements of the craftsmen. On this morning of Palm Sunday the
shaven crowns of the limes were budded gold and pink, the sky a fair
sea-blue over Gisors, with a scurrying fleece of clouds like foam; the
poplars about the meadows were in thei