He smiled:  ‘Our masters desire it, Madame.’

‘Are you very sure of that?’

‘I am here,’ he explained, ‘because I am so sure.’

‘And you desire—­’

‘I, Madame,’ he said quickly and shortly, ’desire two things—­the good of my country and your good.  If I desire anything else, God knows it is to keep my promise.’

‘What is your promise?’

‘Madame,’ said Richard, ‘I bear the Cross on my shoulder, as you see.’

‘Why,’ she said, fearfully regarding it, ‘that is God’s work!’

She began to walk about the room quickly, and to talk to herself.  He could not catch properly what she said.  Religion came into it, and a question of time.  ‘Now it should be done, now it should be done!’ and then, ‘Hear, O thou Shepherd of Israel!’ and then with a wild look into Richard’s face—­’That was a strange thing to do to a lady.  They can never lay that to me!’ Afterwards she began to wring her hands, with a cry of ‘Fie, poison, poison, poison!’ looking at Richard all the time.

‘This poor lady,’ he told himself, ’is possessed by a devil, therefore no wife for me, who have devil enough and to spare.’

‘What ails you, Madame?’ he asked her.  ’Tell me your grief, and upon my life I will amend it if I can.’

‘You cannot,’ she said.  ‘Nothing can mend it.’

’Then, with leave’—­he went to the curtains—­’I will call your Grace’s people.  Our discussions can be later; there is time enough.’

She would have stopped him had she dared, or had the force; but literally she was spent.  There was just time to get the women in before she tumbled.  Richard, in his perplexity, determined to wrangle out the matter with the King on the morrow, cost what it might.  So he did; and to his high surprise the King reasoned instead of railing.  Madame Alois, he said, was weakly, un-wholesome indeed.  In his opinion she wanted, what all young women want, a husband.  She was too much given to the cloister, she had visions, she was feared to use the discipline, she ate nothing, was more often on her knees than on her feet.  ’All this, my son,’ said King Henry, ’you shall correct at your discretion.  Humours, vapours, qualms, fantasies—­pouf!  You can blow them away with a kiss.  Have you tried it?  No?  Too cold?  Nay, but you should.’  And so on, and so on.  That day, none too soon, the French ambassadors arrived, and Richard saw the Count of Saint-Pol among them.

He had never liked the Count of Saint-Pol; or perhaps it would be truer to say that he disliked him more than ordinary.  But he belonged to, had even a tinge of, Jehane; some of her secret fragrance hung about him, he walked in some ray of her glory.  It seemed to Richard, bothered, sick, fretted, a little disconcerted as he was now, that the Count of Saint-Pol had an air which none other of this people had.  He greeted him therefore with more than usual affability, very much to Saint-Pol’s concern.  Richard observed this, and suddenly remembered that he was doing the man what the man must certainly believe to be a cruel wrong. ‘Mort de Dieu! What am I about?’ his heart cried.  ’I ought to be ashamed to look this fellow in the face, and here I am making a brother of him.’