he boy said, after a lengthy
interval, "although I decline--and decline emphatically--to believe you."

The Prince laughed. "There spoke Youth," he said, and he sighed as
though he were a patriarch. "But we have sung, we two, the Eternal
Tenson of God's will and of man's desires. And I claim the prize, my
Little Miguel."

Suddenly the page kissed one huge hand. "You have conquered, my very
dull and very glorious Prince. Concerning that Hawise--" But Miguel de
Rueda choked. "Oh, I do not understand! and yet in part I understand!"
the boy wailed in the darkness.

And the Prince laid one hand upon his page's hair, and smiled in the
darkness to note how soft was this hair, since the man was less a fool
than at first view you might have taken him to be; and he said:

"One must play the game out fairly, my lad. We are no little people,
she and I, the children of many kings, of God's regents here on earth;
and it was never reasonable, my Miguel, that gentlefolk should cheat at
their dicing."

The same night Miguel de Rueda repeated the prayer which Saint Theophilus
made long ago to the Mother of God:

"Dame, je n'ose,
Flors d'aiglentier et lis et rose,
En qui li filz Diex se repose,"

and so on. Or, in other wording: "Hearken, O gracious Lady! thou that
art more fair than any flower of the eglantine, more comely than the
blossoming of the rose or of the lily! thou to whom was confided the
very Son of God! Harken, for I am afraid! afford counsel to me that am
ensnared by Satan and know not what to do! Never will I make an end of
praying. O Virgin debonnaire! O honored Lady! Thou that wast once a
woman--!"

So he prayed, and upon the next day as these two rode southward, he sang
half as if in defiance.

Sang Miguel:

"And still,--whatever years impend
To witness Time a fickle friend,
And Youth a dwindling fire,--
I must adore till all years end
My first love, Heart's Desire.

"I may not hear men speak of her
Unmoved, and vagrant pulses stir
To greet her passing-by,
And I, in all her worshipper
Must serve her till I die.

"For I remember: this is she
That reigns in one man's memory
Immune to age and fret,
And stays the maid I may not see
Nor win to, nor forget."

It was on the following day, near Bazas, that these two encountered Adam
de Gourdon, a Provencal knight, with whom the Prince fought for a long
while, without either contestant giving way; in consequenc