She answered, as though she were thinking about other matters, “Yes.”

Now, for the first time, Sire Edward regarded her with profound consideration.  To the finger-tips this so-little lady showed a descendant of the holy Lewis whom he had known and loved in old years.  Small and thinnish she was, with soft and profuse hair that, for all its blackness, gleamed in the lamplight with stray ripples of brilliancy, as you may see sparks shudder to extinction over burning charcoal.  She had the Valois nose, long and delicate in form, and overhanging a short upper-lip; yet the lips were glorious in tint, and the whiteness of her skin would have matched the Hyperborean snows tidily enough.  As for her eyes, the customary similes of the court poets were gigantic onyxes or ebony highly polished and wet with May dew.  These eyes were too big for her little face:  they made of her a tiny and desirous wraith which nervously endured each incident of life, like a foreigner uneasily acquiescent to the custom of the country.

Sire Edward moved one step toward this tiny lady and paused.  “Madame, I do not understand.”

Dame Meregrett looked up into his face unflinchingly.  “It means that I love you, sire.  I may speak without shame now, for presently you die.  Die bravely, sire!  Die in such fashion as may hearten me to live.”

The little Princess spoke the truth, for always since his coming to Mezelais she had viewed the great conqueror as through an aweful haze of forerunning rumor, twin to that golden vapor which enswathes a god and transmutes whatever in corporeal man would have been a defect into some divine and hitherto unguessed-at excellence.  I must tell you in this place, since no other occasion offers, that even until the end of her life it was so.  For to her what in other persons would have seemed flagrant dulness showed somehow, in Sire Edward, as the majestic deliberation of one that knows his verdict to be decisive, and therefore appraises cautiously; and if sometimes his big, irregular calm eyes betrayed no apprehension of the jest at which her lips were laughing, and of which her brain approved, always within the instant her heart convinced her that a god is not lightly moved to mirth.

And now it was a god—­O deus certe!—­who had taken a woman’s paltry face between his hands, half roughly.  “And the maid is a Capet!” Sire Edward mused.

“Blanch has never desired you any ill, beau sire.  But she loves the Archduke of Austria.  And once you were dead, she might marry him.  One cannot blame her,” Meregrett considered, “since he wishes to marry her, and she, of course, wishes to make him happy.”

“And not herself, save in some secondary way!” the big King said.  “In part I comprehend, madame.  Now I too hanker after this same happiness, and my admiration for the cantankerous despoiler whom I praised this morning is somewhat abated.  There was a Tenson once—­Lord, Lord, how long ago!  I learn too late that truth may possibly have been upon the losing side—­” Thus talking incoherencies, he took up Rigon’s lute.