no other even guessed it.  With that to carry she could lift up her head.  No woman in the world need grudge the usurper of place while she may go on, carrying her title below the heart.  More of this presently.  Two hours before noon, in that clear October weather, over the brown hills came a company of knights on white destriers, with their pennons flying and white cloaks over their mail, the outriders of Navarre.  They were met in the meadow of the Charterhouse and escorted to their quarters, which were on the right of the King’s pavilion.  That same pavilion was of purple silk, worked over with gold leopards the size of life.  It had two standards beside it, the dragon of the English, the leopards of Anjou.  The pavilion of King Sancho was of green silk with silver emblems—­a heart, a castle, a stag; Saint George, Saint Michael, Saint James the Great, and Saint Martin with his split cloak—­a shining place before whose door stood twenty ladies in white, their hair let loose, to receive Madame Berengere and minister to her.  Chief among these was Countess Jehane.  King Richard was not in his own pavilion, but would greet his brother king in the hail of the citadel.

So in due time, after three soundings on the silver trumpets and much curious ceremony of bread and salt, came Don Sancho the Wise in a meinie of his peers, very noble on a roan horse; and Dame Berengere his daughter in a wine-coloured litter, with her ladies about her on ambling palfreys, the colour of burnt grass.  When they took this little princess out of her silken cage the first face she looked for and the first she saw was that of Jehane Saint-Pol, who received her courteously.

Jehane always wore sumptuous clothing, being aware, no doubt, that her person justified the display.  For this time she had dressed herself in silver brocade, let her bosom go bare, and brought the strong golden plaits round about in her favourite fashion.  Upon her head she had a coronet of silver flowers, in her neck a blue jewel.  All the colour she had lay in her hue of faint rose, in her hair like corn in the sun, in her eyes of green, in her deep red lips.  But her height, free build, and liberal curves marked her out of a bevy that glowed in a more Southern fashion.  She had to stoop overmuch to kiss Berengere’s hand; and this made the little Spaniard bite her lip.

Berengere herself was like a bell, in a stiff dress of crimson sewn with great pearls in leaf and scroll-work.  From the waist upwards she was the handle of the bell.  This immoderation of her clothes, the fright she was in—­so nervous at first that she could hardly stand—­became her very ill.  She was quite white in the face, with solemn black eyes, glazed and expressionless; her little hands stuck out from her sides like a puppet’s.  Handsome as no doubt she was, she looked a doll beside the tall Jehane, who could have dandled her comfortably on her knee.  She spoke no language but her own, and that not the langue d’oc, but a blurred