ose both."

Therewith he embraced me, and I set forth to the hostel where I was to
lie that night.

Now, see how far lighter is life to men than to women, for, though I left
the house with the heaviest heart of any man in Tours, often looking back
at the candleshine in my lady's casement, yet, when I reached the
"Hanging Sword," I found Thomas Scott sitting at his wine, and my heart
and courage revived within me. He lacked nothing but one to listen, and
soon was telling tales of the war, and of the road, and of how this one
had taken a rich prisoner, and that one had got an arrow in his thigh,
and of what chances there were to win Paris by an onslaught.

"For in no other can we take it," said he, "save, indeed, by miracle. For
they are richly provisioned, and our hope is that, if we can make a
breach, there may be a stir of the common folk, who are well weary of the
English and the Burgundians."

Now, with his talk of adventures, and with high hopes, I was so heartened
up, that, to my shame, my grief fell from me, and I went to my bed to
dream of trenches and escalades, glory and gain. But Elliot, I fear me,
passed a weary night, and a sorry, whereas I had scarce laid my head on
my pillow, as it seemed, when I heard Thomas shouting to the grooms, and
clatter of our horses' hoofs in the courtyard. So I leaped up, though it
was scarce daylight, and we rode northwards before the full coming of the
dawn.

Here I must needs write of a shameful thing, which I knew not then, or I
would have ridden with a heavier heart, but I was told concerning the
matter many years after, by Messire Enguerrand de Monstrelet, a very
learned knight, and deep in the counsels of the Duke of Burgundy.

"You were all sold," he said to me, at Dijon, in the year of our Lord
fourteen hundred and forty-seven--"you were all sold when you marched
against Paris town. For the Maid, with D'Alencon, rode from Compiegne
towards Paris, on the twenty-third of August, if I remember well"; and
here he turned about certain written parchments that lay by him. "Yea,
on the twenty-third she left Compiegne, but on the twenty-eighth of that
month the Archbishop of Reims entered the town, and there he met the
ambassadors of the Good Duke of Burgundy. There he and they made a
compact between them, binding your King and the Duke, that their truce
should last till Noel, but that the duke might use his men in the defence
of Paris against all that might make onf