Again it was as if the King said,
This is not the greatness or the glory of France! But love and care
had redeemed the derisive parsimony. All the lad wore was exquisitely
neat and the very severity lent the little figure a dignity of its own.

Beside him, but a little behind, stood Love, the Enemy, Ursula de Vesc,
a slim figure in white. One arm was flung over his shoulder, the hand
holding the boy's hand as he raised it across his breast, and she
seemed to draw him back to her so that he half leaned, half lay against
her knee. Her other hand was caught up against her side below the
rounded breast, and pressed there so tensely that the slender,
bloodless fingers lay ivory-white against the hardly purer white of the
bodice. The whole attitude was one of spontaneous, natural, womanly
affection, but as Stephen La Mothe looked a second time he seemed to
find in it both defence and defiance, or if not defiance, then that
vigilant watchfulness which is almost an antagonism. The clasping arm
spoke protection, but a protection which said, "Touch if you dare."

Nor did the expression of her face change his thought. The clear grey
eyes were alert with something more than a girl's fresh interest, the
firm mouth, even while the lips moved, was set in an unconscious
strain, and across the broad forehead two lines were shadowed where no
lines ought to have been. If the face of age, when the sorrows and
experience of years have written anxiety for the uncertain morrow
across it, moves the heart by the story it tells, how much more the
face of youth lined by cares which merciful Time should still have held
unrevealed? There are more valleys of shadows than that of death, and
it seemed to La Mothe that the gloom of some one of them had gathered
thickly round Ursula de Vesc.

Of the three or four others grouped at the further end of the room
Commines was the only familiar figure, and though all turned at the
noise of the brass rings jangling on their rod as Villon drew the
curtain there was no recognition in his eyes. It was the opening of
the lying masquerade, and La Mothe vaguely felt the white horse stumble
as it swerved from the straight course. The soiling of clean hands
spoken of by Commines on the road to Chateau-Renaud had begun.

"Gain the girl and win the boy," whispered Villon as, with his hand
upon La Mothe's arm, they walked up the room together, then aloud,
"Monseigneur and Mademoiselle----"

"Monseigneur