At this the King turned on his heel; over his shoulder he flung:  “I am tireless; also, I am agile as a fox in the pursuit of my desires.  Say that to your Princess.”  Then he went away in a rage.

It had seemed an approvable business to win love incognito, according to the example of many ancient emperors, but in practice he had tripped over an ugly outgrowth from the legendary custom.  The girl hated him, there was no doubt about it; and it was equally certain he loved her.  Particularly caustic was the reflection that a twitch of his finger would get him Katharine as his wife, for before long the Queen-Regent was again attempting secret negotiations to bring this about.  Yes, he could get the girl’s body by a couple of pen-strokes, and had he been older that might have contented him:  as it was, what he wanted was to rouse the look her eyes had borne in Chartres orchard that tranquil morning, and this one could not readily secure by fiddling with seals and parchments.  You see his position:  this high-spirited young man now loved the Princess too utterly to take her on lip-consent, and this marriage was now his one possible excuse for ceasing from victorious warfare.  So he blustered, and the fighting recommenced; and he slew in a despairing rage, knowing that by every movement of his arm he became to her so much the more detestable.

Then the Vicomte de Montbrison, as you have heard, betrayed France, and King Henry began to strip the French realm of provinces as you peel the layers from an onion.  By the May of the year of grace 1420 France was, and knew herself to be, not beaten but demolished.  Only a fag-end of the French army lay entrenched at Troyes, where King Charles and his court awaited Henry’s decision as to the morrow’s action.  If he chose to destroy them root and branch, he could; and they knew such mercy as was in the man to be quite untarnished by previous using.  Sire Henry drew up a small force before the city and made no overtures toward either peace or throat-cutting.

This was the posture of affairs on the evening of the Sunday after Ascension day, when Katharine sat at cards with her father in his apartments at the Hotel de Ville.  The King was pursing his lips over an alternative play, when somebody began singing below in the courtyard.

Sang the voice: 

  “I can find no meaning in life,
  That have weighed the world,—­and it was
  Abundant with folly, and rife
  With sorrows brittle as glass,
  And with joys that flicker and pass
  Like dreams through a fevered head;
  And like the dripping of rain
  In gardens naked and dead
  Is the obdurate thin refrain
  Of our youth which is presently dead.

  “And she whom alone I have loved
  Looks ever with loathing on me,
  As one she hath seen disproved
  And stained with such smirches as be
  Not ever cleansed utterly;
  And is both to remember the days
  When Destiny fixed her name
  As the theme and the goal of my praise;
  And my love engenders shame,
  And I stain what I strive for and praise.