and of two scantily
furnished chambers. The brace of hard-featured females whom Pelham had
provided for the Queen's attendance might speak to her of nothing that
occurred without the gates of Pevensey, and she saw no other persons
save her confessor, a triple-chinned Dominican; had men already lain
Jehane within the massive and gilded coffin of a queen the outer world
would have made as great a turbulence in her ears.

But in the year of grace 1422, upon the feast of Saint Bartholomew,
and about vespers--for thus it wonderfully fell out,--one of those
grim attendants brought to her the first man, save the fat confessor,
whom the Queen had seen within five years. The proud, frail woman
looked and what she saw was the inhabitant of all her dreams.

Said Jehane: "This is ill done. Time has avenged you. Be contented
with that knowledge, and, for Heaven's sake, do not endeavor to
moralize over the ruin which Heaven has made, and justly made, of
Queen Jehane, as I perceive you mean to do." She leaned backward in
the chair, very coarsely clad in brown, but knowing that her coloring
was excellent, that she had miraculously preserved her figure, and
that she did not look her real age by a good ten years. Such
reflections beget spiritual comfort even in a prison.

"Friend," the lean-faced man now said, "I do not come with such
intent, as my mission will readily attest, nor to any ruin, as your
mirror will attest. Instead, madame, I come as the emissary of King
Henry, now dying at Vincennes, and with letters to the lords and
bishops of his council. Dying, the man restores to you your liberty
and your dower-lands, your bed and all your movables, and six gowns of
such fashion and such color as you may elect."

Then with hurried speech he told her of five years' events: of how
within that period King Henry had conquered France, and had married
the French King's daughter, and had begotten a boy who would presently
inherit the united realms of France and England, since in the supreme
hour of triumph King Henry had been stricken with a mortal sickness,
and now lay dying, or perhaps already dead, at Vincennes; and of how
with his penultimate breath the prostrate conqueror had restored to
Queen Jehane all properties and all honors which she formerly enjoyed.

"I shall once more be Regent," the woman said when the Vicomte had
made an end; "Antoine, I shall presently be Regent both of France and
of England, since Dame Katharine is but