ed me; never in all my English life
have I loved man or woman. Do you understand, my Osmund?--the Queen has
many flatterers, but no friends. Not a friend in the world, my Osmund!
And so the Queen makes the best of it and amuses herself."

Somewhat he seemed to understand, for he answered without asperity:

"Mon bel esper, I do not find it anywhere in Holy Writ that God requires
it of us to amuse ourselves; but upon many occasions we have been
commanded to live righteously. We are tempted in divers and insidious
ways. And we cry with the Psalmist, 'My strength is dried up like a
potsherd.' But God intends this, since, until we have here demonstrated
our valor upon Satan, we are manifestly unworthy to be enregistered in
His army. The great Captain must be served by proven soldiers. We may
be tempted, but we may not yield, O daughter of the South! we may not
yield!" he cried, with an unheralded, odd wildness.

"Again you preach," Dame Alianora said. "That is a venerable truism."

"Ho, madame," he returned, "is it on that account the less true?"

Pensively the Queen considered this. "You are a good man, my Osmund,"
she said at last, with a fine irrelevance, "though you are very droll.
Ohime! it is a pity that I was born a princess! Had it been possible for
me to be your wife, I would have been a better woman. I shall sleep now
and dream of that good and stupid and contented woman I might have been."
So presently these two slept in Chantrell Wood.

Followed four days of journeying. As Messer Dante had not yet surveyed
Malebolge, they lacked a parallel for that which they encountered; their
traverse discovered England razed, charred, and depopulate--picked bones
of an island, a vast and absolute ruin about which passion-wasted men
skulked like rats. They went without molestation; malice and death had
journeyed on their road aforetime, as heralds, and had swept it clear.

At every trace of these hideous precessors Osmund Heleigh would say, "By
a day's ride I might have prevented this." Or, "By a day's ride I might
have saved this woman." Or, "By two days' riding I might have fed this
child."

The Queen kept Spartan silence, but daily you saw the fine woman age. In
their slow advance every inch of misery was thrust before her as for
inspection; meticulously she observed and appraised her handiwork.

Bastling the royal army had recently sacked. There remained of this
village the skeletons of two houses,