e of
it. The Duke of Burgundy ate and drank too much. He resembled a sponge,
when empty too rough a customer, when full too juicy. It was on one of
the days when he was very full that, tilting at the ring, he won, or
said he won, forty pounds of Richard. Empty, he claimed them, but
Richard discerned a rasp in his manner of asking, and laughed at him.
The Duke of Burgundy took this ill. He was never quite the same to
Richard again; but he made great friends with Prince John.

With all these, and with their courtiers, who took complexion from their
masters, Jehane had to hold the fair way. As a mistress who was to be a
wife, the veiled familiarity with which she was treated was always
preaching to her. How dare she be a Countess who was of so little
account already? The poor girl felt herself doomed beforehand. What
king's mistress had ever been his wife? And how could she be Richard's
wife, betrothed to Gilles de Gurdun? Richard was much afield in these
days, making military dispositions against his coming absence in
Poictou. She saw him rarely; but in return she saw his peers, and had to
keep her head high among the women of the French court. And so she did
until one day, as she was walking back from mass with her ladies, she
saw her brother Saint-Pol on horseback, him and William des Barres.
Timidly she would have slipped by; but Saint-Pol saw her, reined up his
horse in the middle of the street, and stared at her as if she had been
less than nothing to him. She felt her knees fail her, she grew vividly
red, but she kept her way. After this terrible meeting she dared not
leave the convent.

Of course she was quite safe. Saint-Pol could not do anything against
the conqueror of Touraine, the ally of his master; but she felt tainted,
and had thoughts (not for the first time) of taking the veil. One woman
had already taken it; she heard much concerning Madame Alois from the
Canonesses, how she had a little cell at Fontevrault among the nuns
there, how she shivered with cold in the hottest sun, how she shrieked
o' nights, how chattered to herself, and how she used a cruel
discipline. All these things working upon Jehane's mind made her love an
agony. Many and many a time when her royal lover came to visit her she
clung to him with tears, imploring him to cast her off again; but the
more she bewailed the more he pursued his end. In truth he was master by
this time, and utterly misconceived her. Nothing she might say or do