Martinmas (thus Nicolas begins),
Queen Isabeau fled with her daughter the Lady Katharine to Chartres.
There the Queen was met by the Duke of Burgundy, and these two laid
their heads together to such good effect that presently they got back
into Paris, and in its public places massacred some three thousand
Armagnacs. That, however, is a matter which touches history; the root
of our concernment is that, when the Queen and the Duke rode off to
attend to this butcher's business, the Lady Katharine was left behind
in the Convent of Saint Scholastica, which then stood upon the
outskirts of Chartres, in the bend of the Eure just south of that
city. She dwelt for a year in this well-ordered place.

There one finds her upon the day of the decollation of Saint John the
Baptist, the fine August morning that starts the tale. Katharine the
Fair, men called her, with considerable show of reason. She was very
tall, and slim as a rush. Her eyes were large and black, having an
extreme lustre, like the gleam of undried ink,--a lustre at some times
uncanny. Her abundant hair, too, was black, and to-day seemed doubly
sombre by contrast with the gold netting which confined it. Her mouth
was scarlet, all curves, and her complexion was famous for its
brilliancy; only a precisian would have objected that she possessed
the Valois nose, long and thin and somewhat unduly overhanging the
mouth.

To-day as she came through the orchard, crimson garbed, she paused
with lifted eyebrows. Beyond the orchard wall there was a hodgepodge
of noises, among which a nice ear might distinguish the clatter of
hoofs, a yelping and scurrying, and a contention of soft bodies, and
above all a man's voice commanding the turmoil. She was seventeen, so
she climbed into the crotch of an apple-tree and peered over the wall.

He was in rusty brown and not unshabby; but her regard swept over this
to his face, and there noted how his eyes shone like blue winter stars
under the tumbled yellow hair, and noted the flash of his big teeth as
he swore between them. He held a dead fox by the brush, which he was
cutting off; two hounds, lank and wolfish, were scaling his huge body
in frantic attempts to get at the carrion. A horse grazed close at
hand.

So for a heart-beat she saw him. Then he flung the tailless body to
the hounds, and in the act spied two black eyes peeping through the
apple-leaves. He laughed, all mirth to the heels of him.
"Mademoiselle, I fear we have dis