insensate adventure; but he saw his road before him once again, like a long avenue of light, which Jehane made for him with a torch uplifted.  Before it was day, armed from head to foot in chain mail, with a plain shield, and a double-bladed Norman axe in his saddle-bucket, he and his three companions set out on their journey.  They rode leisurely, with loose reins and much turning in the saddle to talk, as if for a meet of the hounds.

Now was that vernal season of the year when winds are boon, the gentle rain never far off, the stars in heaven (like the flowers on earth) washed momently to a freshness which urges men to be pure.  Riding day and night through the green breadth of France, though he had been plucked from the roaring pit of war, Richard (I know) went with a single aim before him—­to see Jehane again.  Nothing else in his heart, I say.  Whatever purpose may have lurked in his mind, in heart he went clean, single in desire, chanting the canticles of Mary and the Virgin Saints.  It was so.  He had been seethed in wicked doings from his boyhood—­I give him you no better than he was:  wild work in Poictou, the scour of hot blood; devil’s work in Touraine, riotous work in Paris, tyrannous in Aquitaine.  He had been blown upon by every ill report; hatred against blood, blasphemy against God’s appointment, violence, clamour, scandal against charitable dealing:  all these were laid to his name.  He had behind him a file of dead ancestors, cut-throats and worse.  He had faced unnameable sin and not blenched, laughed where he should have wept, promised and broken his promise; to be short, he had been a creature of his house and time, too young acquainted with pride and too proud himself to deny it.  But now, with eyes alight like a boy’s because his heart was uplift, he was riding between the new-budded woods, the melodies of a singing-boy on his lips, and swaying before his heart’s eye the figure of a tall girl with green eyes and a sulky, beautiful mouth.  ‘Lord, what is man?’ cried the Psalmist in dejection.  ’Lord, what is man not?’ cry we, who know more of him.

His traverse took him four days and nights.  He rested at La Ferte, at Nogent-le-Rotrou, outside Dreux, and at Rosny.  Here he stayed a day, the Vigil of the Feast of Palms.  He had it in his mind not to see Jehane again until the very moment when he might lose her.

CHAPTER IX

WILD WORK IN THE CHURCH OF GISORS

When in March the chase is up, and the hunting wind searches out the fallow places of the earth, love also comes questing, desire is awake; man seeks maid, and maid seeks to be sought.  If man or maid have loved already the case is worse; we hear love crying, but cannot tell where he is, how or with what honesty to let him in.  All those ranging days Jehane—­whether in bed cuddling her letters, or at the window of her tower, watching with brimmed eyes the pairing of the