desirous wraith which nervously endured each incident of
life--invariably acquiescent, as a foreigner must necessarily be, to
the custom of the country. In fine, this Meregrett was strange and
brightly colored; and she seemed always thrilled with some subtle
mirth, like that of a Siren who notes how the sailor pauses at the
bulwark and laughs a little (knowing the outcome), and does not greatly
care. Yet now Dame Meregrett's countenance was rapt.

And Sire Edward moved one step toward this tiny lady and paused.
"Madame, I do not understand."

Dame Meregrett looked up into his face unflinchingly. "It means that I
love you, sire. I may speak without shame now, for presently you die.
Die bravely, sire! Die in such fashion as may hearten me to live."

The little Princess spoke the truth, for always since his coming to
Mezelais she had viewed the great conqueror as through an aweful haze
of forerunning rumor, twin to that golden vapor which enswathes a god
and transmutes whatever in corporeal man had been a defect into some
divine and hitherto unguessed-at excellence. I must tell you in this
place, since no other occasion offers, that even until the end of her
life it was so. For to her what in other persons would have seemed but
flagrant dulness showed, somehow, in Sire Edward, as the majestic
deliberation of one that knows his verdict to be decisive, and hence
appraises cautiously; and if sometimes his big, calm eyes betrayed no
apprehension of the jest at which her lips were laughing, and of which
her brain very cordially approved, always within the instant her heart
convinced her that a god is not lightly moved to mirth.

[Illustration: "SHE HAD VIEWED THE GREAT CONQUEROR" _Painting by Howard
Pyle_]

And now it was a god--_O deus certe!_--who had taken a woman's paltry
face between his hands, half roughly. "And the maid is a Capet!" Sire
Edward mused.

"Never has Blanch desired you any ill, beau sire. But it is the
Archduke of Austria that she loves, beau sire. And once you were dead,
she might marry him. One cannot blame her," Meregrett considered,
"since he wishes to marry her, and she, of course, wishes to make him
happy."

"And not herself, save in some secondary way!" the big King said. "In
part I comprehend, madame. And I, too, long for this same happiness,
impotently now, and much as a fevered man might long for water. And my
admiration for the Death whom I praised this morning is somewhat