“Yet it may be I must live.  Friend, the man is very old.  Is it wicked to think of that?  For I cannot but think of his great age.”

Then Riczi answered:  “My desires—­may God forgive me!—­have clutched like starving persons at that sorry sustenance.  Friend! ah, fair, sweet friend! the man is human and must die, but love, we read, is immortal.  I am wishful to kill myself, Jehane.  But, oh, Jehane! dare you to bid me live?”

“Friend, as you love me, I entreat you to live.  Friend, I crave of the Eternal Father that if I falter in my love for you I may be denied even the one bleak night of ease which Judas knows.”  The girl did not weep; dry-eyed she winged a perfectly sincere prayer toward incorruptible saints.  Riczi was to remember the fact, and through long years of severance.

For even now, as Riczi went away from Jehane, a shrill singing-girl was rehearsing, yonder behind the yew-hedge, the song which she was to sing at Jehane’s bridal feast.

Sang this joculatrix: 

  “When the Morning broke before us
  Came the wayward Three astraying,
  Chattering in babbling chorus,
  (Obloquies of Aether saying),—­
  Hoidens that, at pegtop playing,
  Flung their Top where yet it whirls
  Through the coil of clouds unstaying,
  For the Fates are captious girls!”

And upon the next day de Lesnerac bore young Jehane from Pampeluna and presently to Saille, where old Jehan the Brave took her to wife.  She lived as a queen, but she was a woman of infrequent laughter.

She had Duke Jehan’s adoration, and his barons’ obeisancy, and his villagers applauded her passage with stentorian shouts.  She passed interminable days amid bright curious arrasses and trod listlessly over pavements strewn with flowers.  She had fiery-hearted jewels, and shimmering purple cloths, and much furniture adroitly carven, and many tapestries of Samarcand and Baldach upon which were embroidered, by brown fingers that time had turned long ago to Asian dust, innumerable asps and deer and phoenixes and dragons and all the motley inhabitants of air and of the thicket; but her memories, too, she had, and for a dreary while she got no comfort because of them.  Then ambition quickened.

Young Antoine Riczi likewise nursed his wound as best he might; but at the end of the second year after Jehane’s wedding his uncle, the Vicomte de Montbrison—­a gaunt man, with preoccupied and troubled eyes—­had summoned Antoine into Lyonnois and, after appropriate salutation, had informed the lad that, as the Vicomte’s heir, he was to marry the Demoiselle Gerberge de Nerac upon the ensuing Michaelmas.

“That I may not do,” said Riczi; and since a chronicler that would tempt fortune should never stretch the fabric of his wares too thin (unlike Sir Hengist), I merely tell you these two dwelt together at Montbrison for a decade:  and the Vicomte swore at his nephew and predicted this or that disastrous destination as often as Antoine declined to marry the latest of his uncle’s candidates,—­in whom the Vicomte was of an astonishing fertility.