--"I say to you, go home to
your too-tedious wife, the source of all your glory! sit at her feet!
and let her teach you what love is!" He flung away the dagger. "There
you have the truth. Now summon your attendants, my tres beau sire, and
have me hanged."

The King made no movement. "You have been bold--" he said at last.

"But you have been far bolder, sire. For twenty years you have dared
to flout that love which is God's noblest heritage to His children."

King Edward sat in meditation for a long while. The squinting of his
left eye was now very noticeable. "I consider my wife's clerk," he
drily said, "to discourse of love in somewhat too much the tone of a
lover." And a flush was his reward.

But when this Copeland spoke he was like one transfigured. His voice
was grave and very tender, and he said:

"As the fish have their life in the waters, so I have and always shall
have mine in love. Love made me choose and dare to emulate a lady,
long ago, through whom I live contented, without expecting any other
good. Her purity is so inestimable that I cannot say whether I derive
more pride or sorrow from its preeminence. She does not love me, and
she will never love me. She would condemn me to be hewed in fragments
sooner than permit her husband's finger to be injured. Yet she
surpasses all others so utterly that I would rather hunger in her
presence than enjoy from another all which a lover can devise."

Sire Edward stroked the table through this while, with an inverted
pen. He cleared his throat. He said, half-fretfully:

"Now, by the Face! it is not given every man to love precisely in this
troubadourish fashion. Even the most generous person cannot render to
love any more than that person happens to possess. I have read in an
old tale how the devil sat upon a cathedral spire and white doves flew
about him. Monks came and told him to begone. 'Do not the spires show
you, O son of darkness' they clamored, 'that the place is holy?' And
Satan (in this old tale) replied that these spires were capable of
various interpretations. I speak of symbols, John. Yet I also have
loved, in my own fashion,--and, it would seem, I win the same reward
as you."

The King said more lately: "And so she is at Stirling now? hobnob with
my armed enemies, and cajoling that red lecher Robert Stewart?" He
laughed, not overpleasantly. "Eh, yes, it needed a bold person to
bring all your tidings! But you Brabanters are a very thorough-going