"I do not know, my lord, how your conscience may be, but your body has
certainly not been bettered by your pilgrimage. I fear me that your
journeyings by night have done you more harm than your journeyings by
day, for had you gone to Jerusalem on foot you would have come back more
sunburnt, indeed, but not so thin and weak. Pay good heed to this one,
and worship no longer such images as those, which, instead of reviving
the dead, cause the living to die. I would say more, but if your body
has sinned it has been well punished, and I feel too much pity for you
to add any further distress."

When my Lord of Avannes heard these words, he was as sorry as he was
ashamed.

"Madam," he replied, "I have heard that repentance follows upon sin, and
now I have proved it to my cost. But I pray you pardon my youth, which
could not have been punished save by the evil in which it would not
believe."

Thereupon changing her discourse, the lady made him lie down in a
handsome bed, where he remained for a fortnight, taking nothing but
restoratives; and the lady and her husband constantly kept him company,
so that he always had one or the other beside him. And although he had
acted foolishly, as you have heard, contrary to the desire and counsel
of the virtuous lady, she, nevertheless, lost nought of the virtuous
love that she felt towards him, for she still hoped that, after spending
his early youth in follies, he would throw them off and bring himself to
love virtuously, and so be all her own.

During the fortnight that he was in her house, she held to him such
excellent discourse, all tending to the love of virtue, that he began to
loathe the folly that he had committed. Observing, moreover, the lady's
beauty, which surpassed that of the wanton one, and becoming more and
more aware of the graces and virtues that were in her, he one day, when
it was rather dark, could not longer hold from speaking, but, putting
away all fear, said to her--

"I see no better means, madam, for becoming a virtuous man such as you
urge me and desire me to be, than by being heart and soul in love with
virtue. I therefore pray you, madam, to tell me whether you will give me
in this matter all the assistance and favour that you can."

The lady rejoiced to find him speaking in this way, and replied--

"I promise you, my lord, that if you are in love with virtue as it
beseems a lord like yourself to be, I will assist your efforts with all
the strength