only Mahi de Vernoil was unsubdued.

Prince Guillaume laughed a little when he told his kinsman of the
posture of affairs, as more loudly did Guillaume's gross son, Sire
Philibert. But Madona Biatritz did not laugh. She was the widow of
Guillaume's dead brother--Prince Conrat, whom Guillaume succeeded--and
it was in her honor that Raimbaut had made those songs which won him
eminence as a practitioner of the Gay Science.

Biatritz said, "It is a long while since we two met."

He that had been her lover all his life said, "Yes."

She was no longer the most beautiful of women, no longer his be-hymned
Belhs Cavaliers--you may read elsewhere how he came to call her that in
all his canzons--but only a fine and gracious stranger. It was
uniformly gray, that soft and plentiful hair, where once such gold had
flamed as dizzied him to think of even now; there was no crimson in
these thinner lips; and candor would have found her eyes less wonderful
than those Raimbaut had dreamed of very often among an alien and
hostile people. But he lamented nothing, and to him she was as ever
Heaven's most splendid miracle.

"Yes," said this old Raimbaut,--"and even to-day we have not reclaimed
the Sepulcher as yet. Oh, I doubt if we shall ever win it, now that
your brother and my most dear lord is dead." Both thought a while of
Boniface de Montferrat, their playmate once, who yesterday was King of
Thessalonica and now was so much Macedonian dust.

She said: "This week the Prince sent envoys to my nephew. . . . And
so you have come home again----" Color had surged into her time-worn
face, and as she thought of things done long ago this woman's eyes were
like the eyes of his young Biatritz. She said: "You never married?"

He answered: "No, I have left love alone. For Love prefers to take
rather than to give; against a single happy hour he balances a hundred
miseries, and he appraises one pleasure to be worth a thousand pangs.
Pardieu, let this immortal usurer contrive as may seem well to him, for
I desire no more of his bounty or of his penalties."

"No, we wish earnestly for nothing, either good or bad," said Dona
Biatritz--"we who have done with loving."

They sat in silence, musing over ancient happenings, and not looking at
each other, until the Prince came with his guests, who seemed to laugh
too heartily.

Guillaume's frail arm was about his kinsman, and Guillaume chuckled
over jests and by-words that had been between