satirist of Rome town, and with some show of reason."

Followed silence.

One sees them thus trudging the brown, naked plains under a sky of steel.
In a pageant the woman, full-veined and comely, her russet gown girded up
like a harvester's, might not inaptly have prefigured October; and for
less comfortable November you could nowhere have found a symbol more
precise than her lank companion, humorously peevish under his white
thatch of hair, and so constantly fretted by the sword tapping at his
ankles.

They made Hurlburt prosperously and found it vacant, for the news of
Falmouth's advance had driven the villagers hillward. There was in this
place a child, a naked boy of some two years, lying on a doorstep,
overlooked in their gross terror. As the Queen with a sob lifted this
boy the child died.

"Starved!" said Osmund Heleigh; "and within a stone's-throw of my snug
home!"

The Queen laid down the tiny corpse, and, stooping, lightly caressed its
sparse flaxen hair. She answered nothing, though her lips moved.

Past Vachel, scene of a recent skirmish, with many dead in the gutters,
they were overtaken by Falmouth himself, and stood at the roadside to
afford his troop passage. The Marquess, as he went by, flung the Queen a
coin, with a jest sufficiently high-flavored. She knew the man her
inveterate enemy, knew that on recognition he would have killed her as he
would a wolf; she smiled at him and dropped a curtsey.

[Illustration: "THEY WERE OVERTAKEN BY FALMOUTH HIMSELF" _Painting by
Howard Pyle_]

"That is very remarkable," Messire Heleigh observed. "I was hideously
afraid, and am yet shaking. But you, madame, laughed."

The Queen replied: "I laughed because I know that some day I shall have
Lord Falmouth's head. It will be very sweet to see it roll in the dust,
my Osmund."

Messire Heleigh somewhat dryly observed that tastes differed.

At Jessop Minor a more threatening adventure befell. Seeking food at the
_Cat and Hautbois_ in that village, they blundered upon the same troop at
dinner in the square about the inn. Falmouth and his lieutenants were
somewhere inside the house. The men greeted the supposed purveyors of
amusement with a shout; and one among them--a swarthy rascal with his
head tied in a napkin--demanded that the jongleurs grace their meal with
a song.

At first Osmund put him off with a tale of a broken viol.

But, "Haro!" the fellow blustered; "by blood and by nails! you will