your meditations ere you were born.'

Rosamund said, quite simply: 'You have known him always. I envy the circumstance, Madame Gertrude—you alone of all women in the world I envy, since you, his sister, being so much older, must have known him always.'

'I know him to the core, my girl,' the Countess answered, and afterward sat silent, one bare foot jogging restlessly; 'yet am I two years the junior— Did you hear nothing, Rosamund?'

'Nay, Madame Gertrude, I heard nothing.'

'Strange!' the Countess said; 'let us have lights, since I can no longer endure the overpopulous darkness.' She kindled, with twitching fingers, three lamps and looked in vain for more. 'It is as yet dark yonder, where the shadows quiver very oddly, as though they would rise from the floor—do they not, my girl?—and protest vain things. Nay, Rosamund, it has been done; in the moment of death men's souls have travelled farther and have been visible; it has been done, I tell you. And he would stand before me, with pleading eyes, and reproach me in a voice too faint to reach my ears—but I would see him—and his groping hands would clutch at my hands as though a dropped veil had touched me, and with the contact I would go mad!'

'Madame Gertrude!' the girl now stammered, in communicated terror.

'Poor innocent dastard!' the woman said, 'I am Ysabeau of France.' And when Rosamund made as though to rise, in alarm, Queen Ysabeau caught her by the shoulder. 'Bear witness when he comes I never hated him. Yet for my quiet it was necessary that it suffer so cruelly, the scented, pampered body, and no mark be left upon it! Eia! even now he suffers! Nay, I have lied. I hate the man, and in such fashion as you will comprehend only when you are Sarum's wife.'

'Madame and Queen!' the girl said, 'you will not murder me!'

'I am tempted!' the Queen hissed. 'O little slip of girlhood, I am tempted, for it is not reasonable you should possess everything that I have lost. Innocence you have, and youth, and untroubled eyes, and quiet dreams, and the glad beauty of the devil, and Gregory Darrell's love—' Now Ysabeau sat down upon the bed and caught up the girl's face between two fevered hands. 'Rosamund, this Darrell perceives within the moment, as I do, that the love he bears for you is but what he remembers of the love he bore a certain maid long dead. Eh, you might have been her sister, Rosamund, for you are very like her. And she, poor wench—why, I could see her now, I think, were my eyes not blurred, somehow, almost as though Queen Ysabeau might weep! But she was handsomer than you, since your complexion is not overclear, praise God!'

Woman against woman they were. 'He has told me of his intercourse with you,' the girl said, and this was a lie flatfooted. 'Nay, kill me if you will, madame, since you are the stronger, yet, with my dying breath, Gregory has loved but me.'

'Ma belle,' the Queen answered, and laughed bitterly, 'do I not know men? He told you nothing. And to-night he hesitated, and to-morrow, at the lifting of my finger, he will supplicate. Throughout his life has Gregory Darrell loved me, O white, palsied innocence! and he is mine at a whistle. And in that time to come he will desert you, Rosamund—though with a pleasing Canzon—and they will give you to the gross Earl of Sarum, as they gave me to the painted man who was of late our King! and in that time to come you will know your body to be your husband's makeshift when he lacks leisure to seek out other recreation! and in that time to come you will long at first for death, and presently your heart will be a flame within you, my Rosamund, an insatiable flame! and you will hate your God because He made you, and hate Satan because in some desperate hour he tricked you, and hate all masculinity because, poor fools, they scurry to obey your whim! and chiefly hate yourself because you are so pitiable! and devastation only will you love in that strange time which is to come. It is adjacent, my Rosamund.'

The girl kept silence. She sat erect in the tumbled bed, her hands clasping her knees, and appeared to deliberate what Dame Ysabeau had said. The plentiful brown hair fell about this Rosamund's face, which was white and shrewd. 'A part of what you say, madame, I understand. I know that Gregory Darrell loves me, yet I have long ago acknowledged he loves me but as one pets a child, or, let us say, a spaniel which reveres and amuses one. I lack his wit, you comprehend, and so he never speaks to me all that he thinks. Yet a part of it he tells me, and he loves me, and with this I am content. Assuredly, if they give me to Sarum I shall hate Sarum even more than I detest him now. And then, I think, Heaven help me! that I would not greatly grieve— Oh, you are all evil!' Rosamund said; 'and you thrust thoughts into my mind I may not grapple with!'

'You will comprehend them,' the Queen said, 'when you know yourself a chattel, bought and paid for.'

The Queen laughed. She rose, and either hand strained toward heaven. 'You are omnipotent, yet have You let me become that into which I am transmuted,' she said, very low.

Anon she began, as though a statue spoke through motionless and pallid lips. 'They have long urged me, Rosamund, to a deed which by one stroke would make me mistress of these islands. To-day I looked on Gregory Darrell, and knew that I was wise in love—and I had but to crush a filthy worm to come to him. Eh, and I was tempted—!'

The fearless girl said: 'Let us grant that Gregory loves you very greatly, and me just when his leisure serves. You may offer him a cushioned infamy, a colorful and brief delirium, and afterward demolishment of soul and body; I offer him contentment and a level life, made up of tiny happenings, it may be, and lacking both in abysses and in skyey heights. Yet is love a flame wherein must the lover's soul be purified, as an ore by fire, even to its own discredit; and thus, madame, to judge between us I dare summon you.'

'Child, child!' the Queen said, tenderly, and with a smile, 'you are brave; and in your fashion you are wise; yet you will never comprehend. But once I was in heart and soul and body all that you are to-day; and now I am Queen Ysabeau. Assuredly, it would be hard to yield my single chance of happiness; it would be hard to know that Gregory Darrell must presently dwindle into an ox well-pastured, and garner of life no more than any ox; but to say, 'Let this girl become as I, and garner that which I have garnered—!' Did you in truth hear nothing, Rosamund?'

'Why, nothing save the wind.'

'Strange!' said the Queen; 'since all the while that I have talked with you I have been seriously annoyed by shrieks and various imprecations! But I, too, grow cowardly, it maybe— Nay, I know,' she said, and in a resonant voice, 'that I am by this mistress of broad England, until my son—my own son, born of my body, and in glad anguish, Rosamund—knows me for what I am. For I have heard— Coward! O beautiful sleek coward!' the Queen said; 'I would have died without lamentation and I was but your plaything!'

'Madame Ysabeau—!' the girl stammered, and ran toward her, for the girl had risen, and she was terrified.

'To bed!' said Ysabeau; 'and put out the lights lest he come presently. Or perhaps he fears me now too much to come to-night. Yet the night approaches, none the less, when I must lift some arras and find him there, chalk- white, with painted cheeks, and rigid, and smiling very terribly, or look into some mirror and behold there not myself but him—and in that instant I will die. Meantime I rule, until my son attains his manhood. Eh, Rosamund, my only son was once so tiny, and so helpless, and his little crimson mouth groped toward me, helplessly, and save in Bethlehem, I thought, there was never any child more fair— But I must forget all that, for even now he plots. Hey, God orders matters very shrewdly, my Rosamund.'

And timidly the girl touched one shoulder. 'In part, I understand, madame and Queen.'

'You understand nothing,' said Ysabeau; 'how should you understand whose breasts are yet so tiny? Nay, put out the light! though I dread the darkness, Rosamund—For they say that hell is poorly lighted—and they say—' Then Queen Ysabeau shrugged. Herself blew out each lamp.

'We know this Gregory Darrell,' the Queen said in the darkness, and aloud, 'ay, to the marrow we know him, however steadfastly we blink, and we know the present turmoil of his soul; and in common-sense what chance have you of victory?'

'None in common-sense, madame, and yet you go too fast. For man is a being of mingled nature, we are told by those in holy orders, and his life here but one unending warfare between that which is divine in him and that which is bestial, while impartial Heaven attends as arbiter of the cruel tourney. Always his judgment misleads the man, and his faculties allure him to a truce, however brief, with iniquity. His senses raise a mist about his goings, and there is not an endowment of the man but in the end plays traitor to his interest, as of His wisdom God intends; so that when the man is overthrown, God the Eternal Father may, in reason, be neither vexed nor grieved if only he takes heart to rise again. And when, betrayed and impotent, the man elects to fight out the allotted battle, defiant of common-sense and of the counsellors which God Himself accorded, I think that they hold festival in heaven.'

'A very pretty sermon,' said the Queen, and with premeditation yawned.

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