r than yours." Messire Osmund Heleigh
gathered his papers into a neat pile. "This room is mine. To-night I
keep guard in the corridor, madame. We will start at dawn."

When he had gone, Dame Alianora laughed contentedly. "Mon bel esper! my
fairest hope! The man called me that in his verses--thirty years ago!
Yes, I may trust you, my poor Osmund."

So they set out at cockcrow. He had procured for himself a viol and a
long falchion, and had somewhere got suitable clothes for the Queen; and
in their aging but decent garb the two approached near enough to the
appearance of what they desired to be thought. In the courtyard a knot
of servants gaped, nudged one another, but openly said nothing. Messire
Heleigh, as they interpreted it, was brazening out an affair of
gallantry before the countryside; and they esteemed his casual
observation that they would find a couple of dead men on the common
exceedingly diverting.

When the Queen asked him the same morning, "And what will you sing, my
Osmund? Shall we begin the practise of our new profession with the
Sestina of Spring?"--old Osmund Heleigh grunted out: "I have forgotten
that rubbish long ago. _Omnis amans, amens_, saith the satirist of Rome
town, and with reason."

Followed silence.

One sees them thus trudging the brown, naked plains under a sky of
steel. In a pageant the woman, full-veined and comely, her russet gown
girded up like a harvester's might not inaptly have prefigured October;
and for less comfortable November you could nowhere have found a symbol
more precise than her lank companion, humorously peevish under his white
thatch of hair, and constantly fretted by the sword tapping at his
ankles.

They made Hurlburt prosperously and found it vacant, for the news of
Falmouth's advance had driven the villagers hillward. There was in this
place a child, a naked boy of some two years, lying on a doorstep,
overlooked in his elders' gross terror. As the Queen with a sob lifted
this boy the child died.

"Starved!" said Osmund Heleigh; "and within a stone's throw of my snug
home!"

The Queen laid down the tiny corpse, and, stooping, lightly caressed
its sparse flaxen hair. She answered nothing, though her lips moved.

Past Vachel, scene of a recent skirmish, with many dead in the gutters,
they were overtaken by Falmouth himself, and stood at the roadside to
afford his troop passage. The Marquess, as he went by, flung the Queen a
coin, with a jest sufficiently hi