n they wearied of their playing),
Cast the Ball where now it whirls
Through the coil of clouds unstaying,
For the Fates are merry girls!_"

And upon the next day de Lesnerac bore young Jehane from Pampeluna and
presently to Saille, where old Jehan the Brave took her to wife. She
lived as a queen, but she was a woman of infrequent laughter.

She had Duke Jehan's adoration, and his barons' obeisancy, and his
villagers applauded her passage with stentorian shouts. She passed
interminable days amid bright curious arrasses and trod listlessly over
pavements strewn with flowers. Fiery-hearted jewels she had, and
shimmering purple cloths, and much furniture adroitly carven, and many
tapestries of Samarcand and Baldach upon which were embroidered, by
brown fingers time turned long ago to Asian dust, innumerable asps and
deer and phoenixes and dragons and all the motley inhabitants of air
and of the thicket: but her memories, too, she had, and for a dreary
while she got no comfort because of them. Then ambition quickened.

Young Antoine Riczi likewise nursed his wound as best he might; but
about the end of the second year his uncle, the Vicomte de
Montbrison--a gaunt man, with preoccupied and troubled eyes--had
summoned Antoine into Lyonnois and, after appropriate salutation, had
informed the lad that, as the Vicomte's heir, he was to marry the
Demoiselle Gerberge de Nerac upon the ensuing Michaelmas.

"That I may not do," said Riczi; and since a chronicler that would
tempt fortune should never stretch the fabric of his wares too thin,
unlike Sir Hengist, I merely tell you these two dwelt together at
Montbrison for a decade, and always the Vicomte swore at his nephew and
predicted this or that disastrous destination so often as Antoine
declined to marry the latest of his uncle's candidates--in whom the
Vicomte was of an astonishing fertility.

In the year of grace 1401 came the belated news that Duke Jehan had
closed his final day. "You will be leaving me!" the Vicomte growled;
"now, in my decrepitude, you will be leaving me! It is abominable, and
I shall in all likelihood disinherit you this very night."

"Yet it is necessary," Riczi answered; and, filled with no unhallowed
joy, rode not long afterward for Vannes, in Brittany, where the
Duchess-Regent held her court. Dame Jehane had within that fortnight
put aside her mourning, and sat beneath a green canopy, gold-fringed
and powdered with many golden st