n, and in such fashion as you
will comprehend only when you are Sarum's wife."

"Madame and Queen!" the girl said, "you will not murder me!"

"I am tempted!" the Queen hissed. "O little slip of girlhood, I am
tempted, for it is not reasonable you should possess everything that I
have lost. Innocence you have, and youth, and untroubled eyes, and
quiet dreams, and the glad beauty of the devil, and Gregory Darrell's
love--" Now Ysabeau sat down upon the bed and caught up the girl's
face between two fevered hands. "Rosamund, this Darrell perceives
within the moment, as I do, that the love he bears for you is but what
he remembers of the love he bore a certain maid long dead. Eh, you
might have been her sister, Rosamund, for you are very like her. And
she, poor wench--why, I could see her now, I think, were my eyes not
blurred, somehow, almost as though Queen Ysabeau might weep! But she
was handsomer than you, since your complexion is not overclear, praise
God!"

Woman against woman they were. "He has told me of his intercourse with
you," the girl said, and this was a lie flatfooted. "Nay, kill me if
you will, madame, since you are the stronger, yet, with my dying
breath, Gregory has loved but me."

"Ma belle," the Queen answered, and laughed bitterly, "do I not know
men? He told you nothing. And to-night he hesitated, and to-morrow,
at the lifting of my finger, he will supplicate. Throughout his life
has Gregory Darrell loved me, O white, palsied innocence! and he is
mine at a whistle. And in that time to come he will desert you,
Rosamund--though with a pleasing Canzon--and they will give you to the
gross Earl of Sarum, as they gave me to the painted man who was of late
our King! and in that time to come you will know your body to be your
husband's makeshift when he lacks leisure to seek out other recreation!
and in that time to come you will long at first for death, and
presently your heart will be a flame within you, my Rosamund, an
insatiable flame! and you will hate your God because He made you, and
hate Satan because in some desperate hour he tricked you, and hate all
masculinity because, poor fools, they scurry to obey your whim! and
chiefly hate yourself because you are so pitiable! and devastation only
will you love in that strange time which is to come. It is adjacent,
my Rosamund."

The girl kept silence. She sat erect in the tumbled bed, her hands
clasping her knees, and appeared to deliberat