Said Jehane:  “This is ill done.  Time has avenged you.  Be contented with that knowledge, and, for Heaven’s sake, do not endeavor to moralize over the ruin which Heaven has made, and justly made, of Queen Jehane, as I perceive you mean to do.”  She leaned backward in the chair, very coarsely clad in brown, but knowing that her coloring was excellent, that she had miraculously preserved her figure, and that she did not look her real age by a good ten years.  Such reflections beget spiritual comfort even in a prison.

“Friend,” the lean-faced man now said, “I do not come with such intent, as my mission will readily attest, nor to any ruin, as your mirror will attest.  Instead, madame, I come as the emissary of King Henry, now dying at Vincennes, and with letters to the lords and bishops of his council.  Dying, the man restores to you your liberty and your dower-lands, your bed and all your movables, and six gowns of such fashion and such color as you may elect.”

Then with hurried speech he told her of five years’ events:  of how within that period King Henry had conquered France, and had married the French King’s daughter, and had begotten a boy who would presently inherit the united realms of France and England, since in the supreme hour of triumph King Henry had been stricken with a mortal sickness, and now lay dying, or perhaps already dead, at Vincennes; and of how with his penultimate breath the prostrate conqueror had restored to Queen Jehane all properties and all honors which she formerly enjoyed.

“I shall once more be Regent,” the woman said when the Vicomte had made an end; “Antoine, I shall presently be Regent both of France and of England, since Dame Katharine is but a child.”  Jehane stood motionless save for the fine hands that plucked the air.  “Mistress of Europe! absolute mistress, and with an infant ward! now, may God have mercy on my unfriends, for they will soon perceive great need of it!”

“Yet was mercy ever the prerogative of royal persons,” the Vicomte suavely said, “and the Navarrese we know of was both royal and very merciful, O Constant Lover.”

The speech was as a whip-lash.  Abruptly suspicion kindled in her shrewd gray eyes.  “Harry of Monmouth feared neither man nor God.  It needed more than any death-bed repentance to frighten him into restoring my liberty.”  There was a silence.  “You, a Frenchman, come as the emissary of King Henry who has devastated France! are there no English lords, then, left alive of his, army?”

The Vicomte de Montbrison said; “There is at all events no person better fitted to patch up this dishonorable business of your captivity, in which no clean man would care to meddle.”

She appraised this, and said with entire irrelevance:  “The world has smirched you, somehow.  At last you have done something save consider how badly I treated you.  I praise God, Antoine, for it brings you nearer.”