I know not what has passed between your Grace and my sister
Jehane; but this I know very well. It will be a strange thing'--he
laughed, not pleasantly--'a strange thing, I say, if you cannot bend
that arbiter to your own way of thinking.' Richard looked at him coldly.

'If I could do that, my friend,' he said, 'I should not suffer
arbitration at all.'

'The proposition was not mine, my lord,' urged Saint-Pol.

'It could not be, sir,' Richard said sharply. 'I proposed it myself,
because I consider that a lady has the right to dispose of her own
person. She loved me once.'

'I believe that she is yours at this hour, sire.'

'That is what I propose to find out,' said Richard. 'Enough. What news
have they in Paris?'

Saint-Pol could not help himself; he was bursting with a budget he had
received from the south. 'They greatly admire a sirvente of Bertran de
Born's, sire.'

'What is the stuff of the sirvente?'

'It is a scandalous subject, sire. He calls it the Sirvente of Kings,
and speaks much evil of your Order.' Richard laughed.

'I will warrant him to do that better than any man alive, and allow him
some reason for it. I think I will go to see Bertran.'

'Ha, sire,' said Saint-Pol with meaning, 'he will tell you many things,
some good, and some not so good.'

'Be sure he will,' said Richard. 'That is Bertran's way.'

He would trust no one with his present reflections, and seek no outside
strength against his present temptations. He had always had his way; it
had seemed to come to him by right, by the _droit de seigneur_, the
natural law which puts the necks of fools under the heels of strong men.
No need to consider of all that: he knew that the thing desired lay to
his hand; he could make Jehane his again if he would, and neither King
of England nor King of France, nor Council of Westminster nor Diet of
the Empire could stop him--if he would. But that, he felt now, was just
what he would not. To beat her down with torrents of love-cries; to have
her trembling, cowed, drummed out of her wits by her own heart-beats; to
compel, to dominate, to tame, when her young pride and young strength
were the things most beautiful in her: never, by the Cross of Christ!
That, I suppose, is as near to true love as a man can get, to reverence
in a girl that which holds her apart. Richard got so near precisely
because he was less lover than poet. You may doubt, if you choose (with
Abbot Milo), whether he had love in him. I