“Age has not blinded Father to the fact that your sister is a very handsome woman,” was Rosamund Eastney’s comment.  The period appears to have been after supper, and the girl sat with Gregory Darrell in not the most brilliant corner of the main hall.

The wretched man leaned forward, bit his nether-lip, and then with a tumbling rush of speech told of the sorry masquerade.  “The she-devil designs some horrible and obscure mischief, she plans I know not what.”

“Yet I—­” said Rosamund.  The girl had risen, and she continued with an odd inconsequence:  “You have told me you were Pembroke’s squire when long ago he sailed for France to fetch this woman into England—­”

“—­Which you never heard!” Lord Berners shouted at this point.  “Jasper, a lute!” And then he halloaed, “Gregory, Madame de Farrington demands that racy song you made against Queen Ysabeau during your last visit.”  Thus did the Queen begin her holiday.

It was a handsome couple which came forward, with hand quitting hand tardily, and with blinking eyes yet rapt:  these two were not overpleased at being disturbed, and the man was troubled, as in reason he well might be, by the task assigned him.

“Is it, indeed, your will, my sister,” he said, “that I should sing—­this song?”

“It is my will,” the Countess said.

And the knight flung back his comely head and laughed.  “A truth, once spoken, may not be disowned in any company.  It is not, look you, of my own choice that I sing, my sister.  Yet if Queen Ysabeau herself were to bid me sing this song, I could not refuse, for, Christ aid me! the song is true.”

Sang Sir Gregory: 

  “Dame Ysabeau, la prophecie
  Que li sage dit ne ment mie,
  Que la royne sut ceus grever
  Qui tantost laquais sot aymer—­“[4]

and so on.  It was a lengthy ditty, and in its wording not oversqueamish; the Queen’s career in England was detailed without any stuttering, and you would have found the catalogue unhandsome.  Yet Sir Gregory delivered it with an incisive gusto, desperately countersigning his own death warrant.  Her treacheries, her adulteries and her assassinations were rendered in glowing terms whose vigor seemed, even now, to please their contriver.  Yet the minstrel added a new peroration.

Sang Sir Gregory: 

  “Ma voix mocque, mon cuer gemit—­
  Peu pense a ce que la voix dit,
  Car me membre du temps jadis
  Et d’ung garson, d’amour surpris,
  Et d’une fille—­et la vois si—­
  Et grandement suis esbahi.”

And when Darrell had ended, the Countess of Farrington, without speaking, swept her left hand toward her cheek and by pure chance caught between thumb and forefinger the autumn-numbed fly that had annoyed her.  She drew the little dagger from her girdle and meditatively cut the buzzing thing in two.  She cast the fragments from her, and resting the dagger’s point upon the arm of her chair, one forefinger upon the summit of the hilt, considerately twirled the brilliant weapon.