" the Countess answered. For a while
she sat silent, one bare foot jogging restlessly. "Yet I am two years
his junior--Did you hear nothing, Rosamund?" "No, Madame Gertrude, I
heard nothing."

"Strange!" the Countess said; "let us have lights, since I can no longer
endure this overpopulous twilight." She kindled, with twitching fingers,
three lamps. "It is as yet dark yonder, where the shadows quiver very
oddly, as though they would rise from the floor--do they not, my
girl?--and protest vain things. But, Rosamund, it has been done; in the
moment of death men's souls have travelled farther and have been
visible; it has been done, I tell you. And he would stand before me,
with pleading eyes, and would reproach me in a voice too faint to reach
my ears--but I would see him--and his groping hands would clutch at my
hands as though a dropped veil had touched me, and with the contact I
would go mad!"

"Madame Gertrude!" the girl stammered, in communicated terror.

"Poor innocent fool!" the woman said, "I am Ysabeau of France." And when
Rosamund made as though to rise, in alarm, Queen Ysabeau caught her by
the shoulder. "Bear witness when he comes that I never hated him. Yet
for my quiet it was necessary that it suffer so cruelly, the scented,
pampered body, and no mark be left upon it! Eia! even now he suffers!
No, I have lied. I hate the man, and in such fashion as you will
comprehend when you are Sarum's wife."

"Madame and Queen!" the girl said, "you will not murder me!" "I am
tempted!" the Queen answered. "O little slip of girlhood, I am tempted,
for it is not reasonable you should possess everything that I have lost.
Innocence you have, and youth, and untroubled eyes, and quiet dreams,
and the fond graveness of a child, and Gregory Darrell's love--" Now
Ysabeau sat down upon the bed and caught up the girl's face between two
fevered hands. "Rosamund, this Darrell perceives within the moment, as I
do, that the love he bears for you is but what he remembers of the love
he bore a certain maid long dead. Eh, you might have been her sister,
Rosamund, for you are very like her. And she, poor wench--why, I could
see her now, I think, were my eyes not blurred, somehow, almost as
though Queen Ysabeau might weep! But she was handsomer than you, since
your complexion is not overclear, praise God!"

Woman against woman they were. "He has told me of his intercourse with
you," the girl said, and this was a lie flatfooted. "Nay, ki