a mood to appraise discomfort.

"You came!" this harper said, transfigured; and then again, "You came!"

She breathed, "Yes."

So for a long time they stood looking at each other. She found
adoration in his eyes and quailed before it; and in the man's mind not
a grimy and mean incident of the past but marshalled to leer at his
unworthiness: yet in that primitive garden the first man and woman,
meeting, knew no sweeter terror.

It was by the minstrel a familiar earth and the grating speech of earth
were earlier regained. "The affair is of the suddenest," Alain
observed, and he now swung the lute behind him. He indicated no
intention of touching her, though he might easily have done so as he
sat there exalted by the height of his horse. "A meteor arrives with
more prelude. But Love is an arbitrary lord; desiring my heart, he has
seized it, and accordingly I would now brave hell to come to you, and
finding you there, esteem hell a pleasure-garden. I have already made
my prayer to Destiny that she concede me love, and now of God, our
Father and Master, I entreat quick death if I am not to win you. For,
God willing, I shall come to you again, though in doing so it were
necessary that I split the world like a rotten orange."

"Madness! Oh, brave, sweet madness!" Katharine said. "I am a king's
daughter, and you a minstrel."

"Is it madness? Why, then, I think all sensible men are to be
commiserated. And indeed I spy in all this some design. Across half
the earth I came to you, led by a fox. Heh, God's face!" Alain swore;
"the foxes Samson, that old sinewy captain, loosed among the corn of
heathenry kindled no disputation such as this fox has set afoot. That
was an affair of standing corn and olives spoilt, a bushel or so of
disaster; now poised kingdoms topple on the brink of ruin. There will
be martial argument shortly if you bid me come again."

"I bid you come," said Katharine; and after they had stared at each
other for a long while, he rode away in silence. It was through a
dank, tear-flawed world that she stumbled conventward, while out of the
east the sun came bathed in mists, a watery sun no brighter than a
silver coin.

And for a month the world seemed no less dreary, but about Michaelmas
the Queen-Regent sent for her. At the Hotel de Saint-Pol matters were
much the same. Her mother Katharine found in foul-mouthed rage over
the failure of a third attempt to poison the Dauphin of Vienne, as