how his disloyalty had come to the knowledge of her
who had wished him so well; and that not at second hand, but
from himself to herself; what trouble she had taken to find
him; and how (which stung him most) he had slept three
nights in her company after all. [_After thinking some time
he decides to follow her, and arrives in Brabant on the very
day of her marriage: for she has, in the circumstances, kept
her word to her parents._] Then he tried to go up to her and
salute her, and make some wretched excuse for his fault. But
he was not allowed, for she turned her shoulder on him, and
he could never manage to speak to her all through the day.
He even stepped forward once to lead her out to dance, but
she refused him flatly before all the company, many of whom
heard her. And immediately afterwards another gentleman
came, who bade the minstrels strike up, and she stepped down
from her dais in full view of Gerard and went to dance with
him. And so did the disloyal lover lose his lady.

Now whether this, as the book asserts and as is not at all improbable,
is a true story or not, cannot matter to any sensible person one
farthing. What does matter is that it is a by no means badly told story,
that it resorts to no illegitimate sources or seasonings of interest,
and that it offers opportunities for amplification and "diversity of
administration" to almost any extent. One can fancy it told, at much
greater length and with more or less adjustment to different times, by
great novelists of the most widely varying classes--by Scott and by
Dumas, by Charles Reade and by George Meredith, to mention no living
writer, as might easily be done. Both hero and heroine have more
character between them than you could extract out of fifty of the usual
_nouvelles_, and each lends him or herself to endless further
development. Not a few of the separate scenes--the good parents fussing
over their daughter's intended cavalcade and her thrifty and ingenious
objections; the journey of the uncle and niece (any of the first three
of the great novelists mentioned above would have made chapters of
this); the dramatic and risky passages at the castle _en Barrois_; the
contrast of Katherine's passion and Gerard's sluggishness; and the
fashion in which this latter at once brings on the lout's defeat and
saves the lady from danger at his hands--all this is novel-matter of
al