d unaccountably, to mention that during the French
wars she had ruled England as Regent, and with marvellous
capacity--although this fact, as you will see more lately, is the pivot
of his chronicle._

A solitary page ushered the Vicomte whither she sat alone, by
prearrangement, in a chamber with painted walls, profusely lighted by
the sun, and making pretence to weave a tapestry. When the page had
gone she rose and cast aside the shuttle, and then with a glad and
wordless cry stumbled toward the Vicomte. "Madame and Queen--!" he
coldly said.

A frightened woman, half-distraught, aging now but rather handsome, his
judgment saw in her, and no more; all black and shimmering gold his
senses found her, and supple like some dangerous and lovely serpent;
and with a contained hatred he had discovered, as by the terse
illumination of a thunderbolt, that he could never love any woman save
the woman whom he most despised.

She said: "I had forgotten. I had remembered only you, Antoine, and
Navarre, and the clean-eyed Navarrese--" Now for a little, Jehane
paced the gleaming and sun-drenched apartment as a bright leopardess
might tread her cage. Then she wheeled. "Friend, I think that God
Himself has deigned to avenge you. All misery my reign has been.
First Hotspur, then prim Worcester harried us. Came Glyndwyr afterward
to prick us with his devil's horns. Followed the dreary years that
linked me to the rotting corpse God's leprosy devoured while the poor
furtive thing yet moved. All misery, Antoine! And now I live beneath
a sword."

"You have earned no more," he said. "You have earned no more, O
Jehane! whose only title is the Constant Lover!" He spat it out.

She came uncertainly toward him, as though he had been some not
implacable knave with a bludgeon. "For the King hates me," she
plaintively said, "and I live beneath a sword. Ever the big
fierce-eyed man has hated me, for all his lip-courtesy. And now he
lacks the money to pay his troops, and I am the wealthiest person
within his realm. I am a woman and alone in a foreign land. So I must
wait, and wait, and wait, Antoine, till he devise some trumped-up
accusation. Friend, I live as did Saint Damoclus, beneath a sword.
Antoine!" she wailed--for now was the pride of Queen Jehane shattered
utterly--"within the island am I a prisoner for all that my chains are
of gold."

"Yet it was not until o' late," he observed, "that you disliked the
metal which is