ing some portion of that love you would have squandered on the
harper." His hand closed upon hers.

At his touch the girl's composure vanished. "My lord, you woo too
timidly for one who comes with many loud-voiced advocates. I am
daughter to the King of France, and next to my soul's salvation I
esteem France's welfare. Can I, then, fail to love the King of
England, who chooses the blood of my countrymen as a judicious garb to
come a-wooing in? How else, since you have ravaged my native land,
since you have besmirched the name I bear, since yonder afield every
wound in my dead and yet unburied Frenchmen is to me a mouth which
shrieks your infamy?"

He rose. "And yet, for all that, you love me."

She could not find words with which to answer him at the first effort,
but presently she said, quite simply, "To see you lying in your coffin
I would willingly give up my hope of heaven, for heaven can afford no
sight more desirable."

"You loved Alain."

"I loved the husk of a man. You can never comprehend how utterly I
loved him."

Now I have to record of this great king a piece of magnanimity which
bears the impress of more ancient times. "That you love me is
indisputable," he said, "and this I propose to demonstrate. You will
observe that I am quite unarmed save for this dagger, which I now throw
out of the window--" with the word it jangled in the courtyard below.
"I am in Troyes alone among some thousand Frenchmen, any one of whom
would willingly give his life for the privilege of taking mine. You
have but to sound the gong beside you, and in a few moments I shall be
a dead man. Strike, then! for with me dies the English power in
France. Strike, Katharine! if you see in me but the King of England."

She was rigid; and his heart leapt when he saw it was because of terror.

"You came alone! You dared!"

He answered, with a wonderful smile, "Proud spirit! how else might I
conquer you?"

"You have not conquered!" Katharine lifted the baton beside the gong,
poising it. God had granted her prayer--to save France. Now might the
past and the ignominy of the past be merged in Judith's nobler guilt.
But I must tell you that in the supreme hour, Destiny at her beck, her
main desire was to slap the man for his childishness. Oh, he had no
right thus to besot himself with adoration! This dejection at her feet
of his high destiny awed her, and pricked her, too, with her inability
to understand him. Angrily