s on a wager.

Presently was mingled with the bird's descant low singing of another
kind. Beyond the yew-hedge as these two stood silent, breast to
breast, passed young Jehan Kuypelant, the Brabant page, fitting to the
accompaniment of a lute his paraphrase of the song which Archilochus of
Sicyon very anciently made in honor of Venus Melaenis, the tender Venus
of the Dark.

At a gap in the hedge the Brabanter paused. His melody was hastily
gulped. You saw, while these two stood heart hammering against heart,
his lean face silvered by the moonlight, his mouth a tiny abyss.
Followed the beat of lessening footsteps, while the nightingale
improvised his envoi.

But earlier Jehan Kuypelant also had sung, as though in rivalry with
the bird.

Sang Jehan Kuypelant:

"_Hearken and heed, Melaenis!
For all that the litany ceased
When Time had taken the victim,
And flouted thy pale-lipped priest,
And set astir in the temple
Where burned the fire of thy shrine
The owls and wolves of the desert--
Yet hearken, (the issue is thine!)
And let the heart of Atys,
At last, at last, be mine!_

"_For I have followed, nor faltered--
Adrift in a land of dreams
Where laughter and loving and wonder
Contend as a clamor of streams,
I have seen and adored the Sidonian,
Implacable, fair and divine--
And bending low, have implored thee
To hearken, (the issue is thine!)
And let the heart of Atys,
At last, at last, be mine!_"

It is time, however, that we quit this subject and speak of other
matters. Just twenty years later, on one August day in the year of
grace 1346, Master John Copeland--as men now called the Brabant page,
now secretary to the Queen of England--brought his mistress the
unhandsome tidings that David Bruce had invaded her realm with forty
thousand Scots to back him. The Brabanter found the Queen in company
with the kingdom's arbitress--Dame Catherine de Salisbury, whom King
Edward, third of that name to reign in Britain, and now warring in
France, very notoriously adored and obeyed.

This king, indeed, had been despatched into France chiefly, they
narrate, to release the Countess' husband, William de Montacute, from
the French prison of the Chatelet. You may appraise her dominion by
this fact: chaste and shrewd, she had denied all to King Edward, and in
consequence he could deny her nothing; so she sent him to fetch back
her husband, whom she almost