hat within forty days you assign to me its seignory as
your vassal. And I have had of you since then neither my province nor
my betrothed wife, but only excuses, Sire Philippe."

With eloquence the Frenchman touched upon the emergencies to which the
public weal so often drives men of high station, and upon his private
grief over the necessity--unavoidable, alas!--of returning a hard answer
before the council; and became so voluble that Sire Edward merely
laughed in that big-lunged and disconcerting way of his, and afterward
lodged for a week at Mezelais, nominally passing by his minor title of
Earl of Aquitaine, and as his own ambassador.

Negotiations became more swift of foot, since a man serves himself with
zeal. In addition, the French lords could make nothing of a politician
so thick-witted that he replied to every consideration of expediency
with a parrot-like reiteration of the circumstance that already the
bargain was signed and sworn to: in consequence, while daily they fumed
over his stupidity, daily he gained his point. During this period he
was, upon one pretext or another, very often in the company of his
affianced wife, Dame Blanch.

This lady, I must tell you, was the handsomest of her day; there could
nowhere be found a creature more agreeable to every sense; and she
compelled the adoring regard of men, it is recorded, not gently but in
an imperious fashion. Sire Edward, who, till this, had loved her merely
by report, and, in accordance with the high custom of old, through many
perusals of her portrait, now appeared besotted. He was an aging man,
near sixty, huge and fair, with a crisp beard, and the bright unequal
eyes of Manuel of Poictesme. The better-read at Mezelais began to liken
this so candidly enamored monarch and his Princess to Sieur Hercules at
the feet of Queen Omphale.

The court hunted and slew a stag of ten in the woods of Ermenoueil,
which stand thick about the chateau; and at the hunt's end, these two
had dined at Rigon the forester's hut, in company with Dame Meregrett,
the French King's younger sister. She sat a little apart from the
betrothed, and stared through the hut's one window. We know, nowadays,
it was not merely the trees she was considering.

Dame Blanch seemed undisposed to mirth. "We have slain the stag, beau
sire," she said, "and have made of his death a brave diversion. To-day
we have had our sport of death,--and presently the gay years wind past
us, as our cavalcad