Her voice, as she uttered these words, had in it the ring which was wont to petrify wrong-doers of the feebler kind among her nuns.

“Dear Knight, had the Bishop not forestalled me when he named his palfrey, truly I might have found a fine new name for you!  But now, I pray you of your kindness, leave me alone with my fallen image for a little space, that I may gather up the fragments and give them decent burial.”

With which her courage broke.  She stretched her clasped hands across the table and laid her head upon her arms.

Despair seized the Knight as he stood helpless, looking down upon that proud head laid low.

He longed to lay his hand upon the golden softness of her hair.

But her shoulders shook with a hard, tearless sob, and the Knight fled from the arbour.

As he paced the lawn, on which the Bishop had promenaded the evening before, Hugh cursed his rashness in speaking; yet knew, in the heart of his heart, that he could not have done otherwise.  Mora’s words concerning truth, gave him a background of comfort.  Even so had he ever himself felt.  But would it prove that his honesty had indeed shattered his chances of happiness, and hers?

A new name? . . .  What might it be? . . .  What the mischief, had the Bishop named his palfrey? . . .  Sheba?  Nay, that was the ass!  Solomon?  Nay, that was the mare!  Yet—­how came a mare to be named Solomon?

In his disturbed mental state it irritated him unreasonably that a mare should be called after a king with seven hundred wives!  Then he remembered “black, but comely,” and arrived at the right name, Shulamite.  Of course!  Not Solomon but Shulamite.  He had read that love-poem of the unnamed Eastern shepherd, with the Rabbi in the mountain fastness.  The Rabbi had pointed out that the word used in that description signified “sunburned.”  The lovely Shulamite maiden, exposed to the Eastern sun while tending her kids and keeping the vineyards, had tanned a ruddy brown, beside which the daughters of Jerusalem, enclosed in King Solomon’s scented harem, looked pale as wilting lilies.  Remembering the glossy coat of the black mare, Hugh wondered, with a momentary sense of merriment, whether the Bishop supposed the maiden of the “Song of Songs” to have been an Ethiopian.

Then he remembered “Iconoklastes.”  Yes, surely!  The palfrey was Iconoklastes.  Now wherefore gave the Bishop such a name to his white palfrey?

Striding blindly about the lawn, of a sudden the Knight stepped full on to a flower-bed.  At once he seemed to hear the Bishop’s gentle voice:  “I named him Iconoklastes because he trampled to ruin some flower-beds on which I spent much time and care, and of which I was inordinately fond.”