the
Eternal Father that if I falter in my love for you I may be denied
even the one bleak night of ease which Judas knows." The girl did not
weep; dry-eyed she winged a perfectly sincere prayer toward
incorruptible saints. Riczi was to remember the fact, and through long
years of severance.

For even now, as Riczi went away from Jehane, a shrill singing-girl
was rehearsing, yonder behind the yew-hedge, the song which she was to
sing at Jehane's bridal feast.

Sang this joculatrix:

"When the Morning broke before us
Came the wayward Three astraying,
Chattering in babbling chorus,
(Obloquies of Aether saying),--
Hoidens that, at pegtop playing,
Flung their Top where yet it whirls
Through the coil of clouds unstaying,
For the Fates are captious girls!"

And upon the next day de Lesnerac bore young Jehane from Pampeluna and
presently to Saille, where old Jehan the Brave took her to wife. She
lived as a queen, but she was a woman of infrequent laughter.

She had Duke Jehan's adoration, and his barons' obeisancy, and his
villagers applauded her passage with stentorian shouts. She passed
interminable days amid bright curious arrasses and trod listlessly
over pavements strewn with flowers. She had fiery-hearted jewels, and
shimmering purple cloths, and much furniture adroitly carven, and many
tapestries of Samarcand and Baldach upon which were embroidered, by
brown fingers that time had turned long ago to Asian dust, innumerable
asps and deer and phoenixes and dragons and all the motley inhabitants
of air and of the thicket; but her memories, too, she had, and for a
dreary while she got no comfort because of them. Then ambition
quickened.

Young Antoine Riczi likewise nursed his wound as best he might; but at
the end of the second year after Jehane's wedding his uncle, the
Vicomte de Montbrison--a gaunt man, with preoccupied and troubled
eyes--had summoned Antoine into Lyonnois and, after appropriate
salutation, had informed the lad that, as the Vicomte's heir, he was
to marry the Demoiselle Gerberge de Nerac upon the ensuing Michaelmas.

"That I may not do," said Riczi; and since a chronicler that would
tempt fortune should never stretch the fabric of his wares too thin
(unlike Sir Hengist), I merely tell you these two dwelt together at
Montbrison for a decade: and the Vicomte swore at his nephew and
predicted this or that disastrous destination as often as Antoine
declined to marry the latest of