ered with innumerable silver crescents, sat watching, under a
canopy woven very long ago in Tarshish, and cunningly embroidered with
the figures of peacocks and apes and men with eagles' heads. His hands
caressed each other meditatively.

It was on the afternoon of this day, the last of April, that Sire
Raimbaut came upon Madona Biatritz about a strange employment in the
Ladies' Court. There was then a well in the midst of this enclosure,
with a granite ledge around it carven with lilies; and upon this she
leaned, looking down into the water. In her lap was a rope of pearls,
which one by one she unthreaded and dropped into the well.

Clear and warm the weather was. Without, forests were quickening,
branch by branch, as though a green flame smoldered from one bough to
another. Violets peeped about the roots of trees, and all the world
was young again. But here was only stone beneath their feet; and about
them showed the high walls and the lead-sheathed towers and the
parapets and the sunk windows of Guillaume's chateau. There was no
color anywhere save gray; and Raimbaut and Biatritz were aging people
now. It seemed to him that they were the wraiths of those persons who
had loved each other at Montferrat; and that the walls about them and
the leaden devils who grinned from every waterspout and all those dark
and narrow windows were only part of some magic picture, such as a
sorceress may momentarily summon out of smoke-wreaths, as he had seen
Zoraida do very long ago.

This woman might have been a wraith in verity, for she was clothed
throughout in white, save for the ponderous gold girdle about her
middle. A white gorget framed the face which was so pinched and shrewd
and strange; and she peered into the well, smiling craftily.

"I was thinking death was like this well," said Biatritz, without any
cessation of her singular employment--"so dark that we may see nothing
clearly save one faint gleam which shows us, or which seems to show us,
where rest is. Yes, yes, this is that chaplet which you won in the
tournament at Montferrat when we were young. Pearls are the symbol of
tears, we read. But we had no time for reading then, no time for
anything except to be quite happy. . . . You saw this morning's work.
Raimbaut, were Satan to go mad he would be such a fiend as this
Guillaume de Baux who is our master!"

"Ay, the man is as cruel as my old opponent, Mourzoufle," Sire Raimbaut
answered, with a patient