against her; stole up on his noiseless feet, caught her hands behind her, held her fast, and pulled her back to be kissed.  Once he lifted her up, a sure prisoner, to the top shelf of a cupboard, whence there was no escape but by the way she had gone.  She stayed there quite silent, and when he opened the cupboard doors was found in the same tremulous, expectant state, her eyes still fixed upon him.  Neither he nor she, publicly at least, discussed the past, the present or future; but it was known that he meant to make her his Countess as soon as he could reach Poictiers.  To the onlookers, at any rate to one of them, it seemed that this could never be, and that she knew very well that the hours of this sharp, sweet, piercing intercourse were numbered.  How could it last?  How could she find either reason or courage to hope it?  It seemed to Beziers, on the watch, that she was awaiting the end already.  One is fretted to a rag by waiting.  So Jehane dared not lose a moment of Richard, yet could enjoy not one, knowing that she must soon lose all.

Those six clear days of theirs had been wiselier spent upon the west road; but Richard’s desire outmastered every thought.  Having snatched Jehane from the very horns of the altar, he must hold her, make her his irrevocably at the first breathing place.  Dealing with any but Normans, he had never had his six days.  But the Norman people, as Abbot Milo says, ’slime-blooded, slow-bellies, are withal great eaters of beef, which breeds in them, as well as a heaviness of motion, a certain slumbrous rage very dangerous to mankind.  They crop grief after grief, chewing the cud of grievance; for when they are full of it they disgorge and regorge the abhorred sum, and have stuff for their spleens for many a year.’  Even more than this smouldering nursed hate they love a punctilio; they walk by forms, whether the road is to a lady’s heart or an enemy’s throat.  And so Saint-Pol found, and so Des Barres, Frenchmen both and fiery young men, who shook their fists in the faces of the Gurduns and the dust of such blockish hospitallers off their feet, when they saw the course affairs were to run.  Gilles de Gurdun, if you will believe it, with the advice of his father and the countenance of his young brother Bartholomew, would not budge an inch towards the recovery of his wife or her ravisher’s punishment until he had drawn out his injury fair on parchment.  This he then proposed to carry to his Duke, old King Henry.  ‘Thus,’ said the swart youth, ’I shall be within the law of my land, and gain the engines of the law on my side.’  He seemed to think this important.

‘With your accursed scruples,’ cried Saint-Pol, smiting the table, ’you will gain nothing else.  Within your country’s law, blockhead!  Why, my sister is within the Count’s country by this time!’