d, set apart.' Thus
it was always: menace, wicked endeavour, shipwreck, ruin; always so, her
agony and denial, his wrath and defeat.

But this was wholesome torment. There was other not so
purgatorial--damned torment. That was when the sudden thought of her
possession by another man, of his own robbery, his own impotence to
regain, came upon him in a surging flood and made his neck swell with
the rage of a beast. And no crouching to spring, no flash through the
air, no snatching here. Here was no Gilles de Gurdun to deal with. Only
the beast's resource was his, who had the beast's desire without his
power. At such times of obsession he lashed up and down his chamber or
the flat roof of his house, all the tragic quest of a leopard in a cage
making blank his desperate hunting eyes. 'Lord, Lord, Lord, how long can
this endure?' Alas, the cage was wider than any room, and stronger by
virtue of his own fashioning of the locks. But to do him justice,
Jehane's grave face would sail like a moon among the storm-clouds sooner
or later, and humble him to the dust.

Sometimes, mostly at dawn, when a cool wind stole through the trees, he
saw the trail of events more clearly, and knew whom to blame and whom to
praise. Generous as he was through and through, at these times he did
not spare the whip. But the image he set up before whom to scourge
himself was Jehane Saint-Pol, that pure cold saint, offering up her
proud body for his needs; and so sure as he did that he desired her, and
so sure as he desired he raged that he had been robbed. Robber as he
owned himself, now he had been robbed. So the old black strife began
again. Many and many a dawn, as he thought of these things, he went out
alone into the shadowless places of the land, to the quiet lapping sea,
to the gardens, or to the housetop fronting the new-born day, with
prayer throbbing for utterance, but a tongue too dry to pray. Despair
seized on him, and he led his men out to death-dealing, that so haply
he might find death for himself. The time wore to early summer, while he
was nightly visited by the thought of his sin, and daily winning more
stuff for repentance. Then, one morning, instead of going out singly to
battle with his own soul, he went in to the Abbot Milo. What follows
shall be told in his own words.

'The King came to me very early in the morning of Saints Primus and
Felician, while I yet lay in my bed. "Milo, Milo," said he, "what must I
do to be saved?" He