The Bishop, his diplomacy at an end, grew very red.  He had nothing to say.  Des Barres must needs put in his word.

‘Bethink you, fair sire,’ he says:  ‘the Marquess is of my kindred.’

‘Oh, I do think, Des Barres,’ the King answered him; ’and I am very sorry for you.  But I am not answerable for the trespasses of your ancestry.’

Des Barres glared about him, as if he hoped to find a reply among the joists.

‘My lord,’ he began again, ’it is laid in charge upon us to speak the mind of France.  Our master is greatly put about in his sister’s affair, and not he only, but his allies with him.  Among whom, sire, you must be pleased to reckon my lord John of Mortain.’

He had done better to leave John out; Richard’s eyes burnt him, and his voice cut.  ’Let my brother John have her, who knows her rights and wrongs.  As for you, Des Barres, take back to your master your windy conversation, and this also, that I allow no man to dictate marriages to me.’  So said, he broke up the audience, and would see no more of the ambassadors.  They, in two or three days, departed with what grace they had in them.

The immediate effect of this, you may perhaps expect, was to drive Richard all the road to Navarre.  He was profoundly offended, so much so that not Jehane herself dared speak to him.  As he always did when his heart mastered his head, he acted now alone and at once.  In the heart we choose to seat rage of all sorts, the purest and the most base, the most fervent and the most cold.  It so happened that there was business for our King in Gascony, congenial business.  Guillem de Chisi, a vassal of his, had been robbing pilgrims, so Guillem was to be hanged.  Richard went swift-foot to Cahors, hanged Guillem in front of his own gatehouse, then wrote letters to Pampluna inviting King Sancho to a conference ‘upon many affairs touching Almighty God and ourselves.’  Thus he put it, and King Sancho needed no accents to the vowels.  The wise man set out with a great train, his virgin with him.

* * * * *

The day of his expectation, King Richard heard mass in a most unchristian frame of mind.  There was no Sursum Corda for him; but he knelt like a stone image, inert and cold from breast to backbone; said nothing, moved not.  How differently do men and women stand at the gate of sorrows!  Not far off him knelt Countess Jehane, who in her hands again (it may be said) held up her bleeding heart.  The luxury of this strange sacrifice made the girl glow like a fire opal; she was in a fierce ecstasy, her lips parted, eyes half-shut; she breathed short, she panted.  There is no moralising over these things:  love is a hearty feeder, and thrives on a fast-day as well as on a gaudy.  By fasting come visions, tremors, swoonings and such like, dainty perversions of sense.  But part of Jehane’s exaltation, you must know, came of another spur.  She had a sure and certain hope; she knew what she knew, though