The girl said:  “Let us grant that Gregory loves you very greatly, and me just when his leisure serves.  You may offer him a cushioned infamy, a colorful and brief delirium, and afterward demolishment of soul and body; I offer him contentment and a level life, made up of small events, it may be, and lacking both in abysses and in skyey heights.  Yet is love a flame wherein the lover’s soul must be purified; it is a flame which assays high queens just as it does their servants:  and thus, madame, to judge between us I dare summon you.”  “Child, child!” the Queen said, tenderly, and with a smile, “you are brave; and in your fashion you are wise; yet you will never comprehend.  But once I was in heart and soul and body all that you are to-day; and now I am Queen Ysabeau—­Did you in truth hear nothing, Rosamund?”

“Why, nothing save the wind.”

“Strange!” said the Queen; “since all the while that I have talked with you I have been seriously annoyed by shrieks and imprecations!  But I, too, grow cowardly, it may be—­Nay, I know,” she said, and in a resonant voice, “that by this I am mistress of broad England, until my son—­my own son, born of my body, and in glad anguish, Rosamund—­knows me for what I am.  For I have heard—­Coward!  O beautiful sleek coward!” the Queen said; “I would have died without lamentation and I was but your plaything!”

“Madame Ysabeau—!” the girl answered vaguely, for she was puzzled and was almost frightened by the other’s strange talk.

“To bed!” said Ysabeau; “and put out the lights lest he come presently.  Or perhaps he fears me now too much to come to-night.  Yet the night approaches, none the less, when I must lift some arras and find him there, chalk-white, with painted cheeks, and rigid, and smiling very terribly, or look into some mirror and behold there not myself but him,—­and in that instant I shall die.  Meantime I rule, until my son attains his manhood.  Eh, Rosamund, my only son was once so tiny, and so helpless, and his little crimson mouth groped toward me, helplessly, and save in Bethlehem, I thought, there was never any child more fair—­But I must forget all that, for even now he plots.  Hey, God orders matters very shrewdly, my Rosamund.”

Timidly the girl touched Ysabeau’s shoulder.  “In part, I understand, madame and Queen.”

“You understand nothing,” said Ysabeau; “how should you understand whose breasts are yet so tiny?  So let us put out the light! though I dread darkness, Rosamund—­For they say that hell is poorly lighted—­and they say—­” Then Queen Ysabeau shrugged.  Pensively she blew out each lamp.

“We know this Gregory Darrell,” the Queen said in the darkness, “ah, to the marrow we know him, however steadfastly we blink, and we know the present turmoil of his soul; and in common-sense what chance have you of victory?”