to Paris.'

His wife slipped down from her seat.

'Gave I you not the ostler's gossip from Calais three days since?' she
said, and went towards her roastings.

'But wherefore comes the yellow dog to Paris?' Udal persisted.

'That you may go seek,' she answered. 'But believe always what an
innkeeper says of who are on the road.'

Udal too slipped down from the window-seat; he buttoned his gown down
to his shins, pulled his hat over his ears and hurried through the
galleried courtyard into the comfortless shadows of the street. There
was no doubt that Norfolk was coming; round the tiny crack that, two
houses away, served for all the space that the road had between the
towering housefronts, two men in scarlet and yellow, with leopards and
lions and fleurs-de-lis on their chests, walked between two in white,
tabarded with the great lilies of France. They crushed round the
corner, for there was scarce space for four men abreast; behind them
squeezed men in purple with the Howard knot, bearing pikes, and men in
mustard yellow with the eagle's wing and ship badge of the Provost of
Paris. In the broader space before the arch of Udal's courtyard they
stayed to wait for the horsemen to disentangle themselves from the
alley; the Englishmen looked glumly at the tall housefronts; the
French loosened the mouthplates of their helmets to breathe the air
for a minute. Hostlers, packmen and pedlars began to fill the space
behind Udal, and he heard his wife's voice calling shrilly to a cook
who had run across the yard.

The crowd a little shielded him from the draught which came through
the arch, and he waited with more contentment. Undoubtedly there was
Norfolk upon a great yellow horse, so high that it made his bonnet
almost touch the overhanging storey of the third house; behind him the
white and gold litter of the provost, who, having three weeks before
broken his leg at tennis-play, was still unable to sit in a saddle.
The duke rode as if implacably rigid, his yellow, long face set,
listening as if with a sour deafness to something that the provost
from below called to him with a great, laughing voice.

The provost's litter, too, came up alongside the duke's horse in the
open space, then they all moved forward at the slow processional:
three steps and a halt for the trumpets to blow a tucket; three more
and another tucket; the great yellow horse stepping high and casting
up his head, from which flew many flakes of white foam.