ry well that you are no Countess at all in my son's right, but are
what one of your nurture should not be. And you shall understand that I
am a plain-dealer in such affairs when they concern this realm, and have
bled little heifers like you whiter than veal and as cold as most of the
dead; and will do it again if need be.'

Jehane did not flinch nor turn her eyes from considering her whitening
wrist.

'Oh, Madame,' she says, 'you will never bleed me; I am quite sure of
that. Alas, it would be well if you could, without offence.'

'Why, whom should I offend then?' the Queen said, sniffing--'your
ladyship?'

'A greater,' said Jehane.

'You think the King would be offended?'

'Madame,' Jehane said, 'he could be offended; but so would you be.'

The Queen-Mother tightened hold. 'I am not easily offended, mistress,'
she said, and smiled rather bleakly.

Jehane also smiled, but with patience, not trying to get free her wrist.

'My blood would offend you. You dare not bleed me.'

'Death in life!' the Queen cried, 'is there any but the King to stop me
now?'

'Madame,' Jehane answered, 'there is the spoken word against you, the
spirit of prophecy.'

Then her jailer saw that Jehane's eyes were green, and very steady. This
checked her.

'Who speaks? Who prophesies?'

Jehane told her, 'The leper in a desert place, saying, "Beware the
Count's cap and the Count's bed; for so sure as thou liest in either
thou art wife of a dead man and of his killer."'

The Queen-Mother, a very religious woman, took this saying soberly. She
dropped Jehane's wrist, stared at and about her, looked up, looked down;
then said, 'Tell me more of this, my girl.'

'Hey, Madame,' said Jehane, 'I will gladly tell you the whole. The
saying of the leper was very dreadful to me, for I thought, here is a
man punished by God indeed, but so near death as to be likely familiar
with the secrets of death. Such a one cannot be a liar, nor would he
speak idly who has so little time left to pray in. Therefore I urged my
lord Richard by his good love for me to forgo his purpose of wedding me
in Poictiers. But he would not listen, but said that, as he had stolen
me from my betrothed, it comported not with his honour to dishonour me.
So he wedded me, and fulfilled both terms of the leper's prophecy. Then
I saw myself in peril, and was not at all comforted by the advice of
certain nuns, which was that, although I had lain in the Count's bed, I
had not lain,