s face unflinchingly. "It means that I
love you, sire. I may speak without shame now, for presently you die.
Die bravely, sire! Die in such fashion as may hearten me to live."

The little Princess spoke the truth, for always since his coming to
Mezelais she had viewed the great conqueror as through an aweful haze of
forerunning rumor, twin to that golden vapor which enswathes a god and
transmutes whatever in corporeal man would have been a defect into some
divine and hitherto unguessed-at excellence. I must tell you in this
place, since no other occasion offers, that even until the end of her
life it was so. For to her what in other persons would have seemed
flagrant dulness showed somehow, in Sire Edward, as the majestic
deliberation of one that knows his verdict to be decisive, and therefore
appraises cautiously; and if sometimes his big, irregular calm eyes
betrayed no apprehension of the jest at which her lips were laughing,
and of which her brain approved, always within the instant her heart
convinced her that a god is not lightly moved to mirth.

And now it was a god--_O deus certe!_--who had taken a woman's paltry
face between his hands, half roughly. "And the maid is a Capet!" Sire
Edward mused.

"Blanch has never desired you any ill, beau sire. But she loves the
Archduke of Austria. And once you were dead, she might marry him. One
cannot blame her," Meregrett considered, "since he wishes to marry her,
and she, of course, wishes to make him happy."

"And not herself, save in some secondary way!" the big King said. "In
part I comprehend, madame. Now I too hanker after this same happiness,
and my admiration for the cantankerous despoiler whom I praised this
morning is somewhat abated. There was a Tenson once--Lord, Lord, how
long ago! I learn too late that truth may possibly have been upon the
losing side--" Thus talking incoherencies, he took up Rigon's lute.

Sang Sire Edward:

"Incuriously he smites the armored king
And tricks his counsellors--

"yes, the jingle ran thus. Now listen, madame--listen, the while that I
have my singing out, whatever any little cut-throats may be planning in
corners."

Sang Sire Edward:

"As, later on,
Death will, half-idly, still our pleasuring,
And change for fevered laughter in the sun
Sleep such as Merlin's,--and excess thereof,--
Whence we, divorceless Death our Viviaine
Implacable, may never more regain
The unforgotten rapture, and the pain
A