“You?  Singly?” the Queen demanded.

“My plan is this:  Singing folk alone travel whither they will.  We will go as jongleurs, then.  I can yet manage a song to the viol, I dare affirm.  And you must pass as my wife.”

He said this with simplicity.  The plan seemed unreasonable, and at first Dame Alianora waved it aside.  Out of the question!  But reflection suggested nothing better; it was impossible to remain at Longaville, and the man spoke sober truth when he declared any escort other than himself to be unprocurable.  Besides, the lunar madness of the scheme was its strength; that the Queen would venture to cross half England unprotected—­and Messire Heleigh on the face of him was a paste-board buckler—­was an event which Leicester would neither anticipate nor on report credit.  There you were! these English had no imagination.  The Queen snapped her fingers and said:  “Very willingly will I be your wife, my Osmund.  But how do I know that I can trust you?  Leicester would give a deal for me; he would pay any price for the pious joy of burning the Sorceress of Provence.  And you are not wealthy, I suspect.”

“You may trust me, mon bel esper,”—­his eyes here were those of a beaten child—­“because my memory is better than yours.”  Messire Osmund Heleigh gathered his papers into a neat pile.  “This room is mine.  To-night I keep guard in the corridor, madame.  We will start at dawn.”

When he had gone, Dame Alianora laughed contentedly.  “Mon bel esper! my fairest hope!  The man called me that in his verses—­thirty years ago!  Yes, I may trust you, my poor Osmund.”

So they set out at cockcrow.  He had procured for himself a viol and a long falchion, and had somewhere got suitable clothes for the Queen; and in their aging but decent garb the two approached near enough to the appearance of what they desired to be thought.  In the courtyard a knot of servants gaped, nudged one another, but openly said nothing.  Messire Heleigh, as they interpreted it, was brazening out an affair of gallantry before the countryside; and they esteemed his casual observation that they would find a couple of dead men on the common exceedingly diverting.

When the Queen asked him the same morning, “And what will you sing, my Osmund?  Shall we begin the practise of our new profession with the Sestina of Spring?”—­old Osmund Heleigh grunted out:  “I have forgotten that rubbish long ago. Omnis amans, amens, saith the satirist of Rome town, and with reason.”

Followed silence.

One sees them thus trudging the brown, naked plains under a sky of steel.  In a pageant the woman, full-veined and comely, her russet gown girded up like a harvester’s might not inaptly have prefigured October; and for less comfortable November you could nowhere have found a symbol more precise than her lank companion, humorously peevish under his white thatch of hair, and constantly fretted by the sword tapping at his ankles.