The Queen then said, “But you are unarmed.”

“Highness,” he replied, “it is surely apparent that I, who have played the traitor to two monarchs within the same day, cannot with either decency or comfort survive that day.”  He turned upon the lords and bishops twittering about his horse’s tail.  “You merchandise, get back to your stations, and if there was ever an honest woman in any of your families, the which I doubt, contrive to get yourselves killed this day, as I mean to do, in the cause of the honestest and bravest woman our time has known.”  Immediately the English forces marched toward Merrington.

Philippa returned to her pavilion and inquired for John Copeland.  She was informed that he had ridden off, armed, in company with five of her immediate retainers.  She considered this strange, but made no comment.

You picture her, perhaps, as spending the morning in prayer, in beatings upon her breast, and in lamentations.  Philippa did nothing of the sort.  She considered her cause to be so clamantly just that to expatiate to the Holy Father upon its merits would be an impertinence; it was not conceivable that He would fail her; and in any event, she had in hand a deal of sewing which required immediate attention.  Accordingly she settled down to her needlework, while the Regent of England leaned his head against her knee, and his mother told him that ageless tale of Lord Huon, who in a wood near Babylon encountered the King of Faery, and subsequently bereaved an atrocious Emir of his beard and daughter.  All this the industrious woman narrated in a low and pleasant voice, while the wide-eyed Regent attended and at the proper intervals gulped his cough-mixture.

You must know that about noon Master John Copeland came into the tent.  “We have conquered,” he said.  “Now, by the Face!”—­thus, scoffingly, he used her husband’s favorite oath,—­“now, by the Face! there was never a victory more complete!  The Scottish army is fled, it is as utterly dispersed from man’s seeing as are the sands which dried the letters King Ahasuerus gave the admirable Esther!”

“I rejoice,” the Queen said, looking up from her sewing, “that we have conquered, though in nature I expected nothing else—­Oh, horrible!” She sprang to her feet with a cry of anguish.  Here in little you have the entire woman; the victory of her armament was to her a thing of course, since her cause was just, whereas the loss of two front teeth by John Copeland was a calamity.

He drew her toward the tent-flap, which he opened.  Without was a mounted knight, in full panoply, his arms bound behind him, surrounded by the Queen’s five retainers.  “In the rout I took him,” said John Copeland; “though, as my mouth witnesses, I did not find this David Bruce a tractable prisoner.”

“Is that, then, the King of Scots?” Philippa demanded, as she mixed salt and water for a mouthwash.  “Sire Edward should be pleased, I think.  Will he not love me a little now, John Copeland?”