nt. And I do
not believe that in all France there is a cook who understands his
business." She went away whimpering and proceeded to get tipsy.

The Princess remained quite still, as Dame Isabeau had left her; you
may see a hare crouch so at sight of the hounds. Finally the girl
spoke aloud. "Until last August!" Katharine said. "Until last August!
_Poised kingdoms topple on the brink of ruin, now that you bid me come
to you again_. And I bade him come!" Presently she went into her
oratory and began to pray.

In the midst of her invocation she wailed: "Fool, fool! How could I
have thought him less than a king!"

You are to imagine her breast thus adrum with remorse and hatred of
herself, what time town by town fell before the invader like
card-houses. Every rumor of defeat--and they were many--was her
arraignment; impotently she cowered at God's knees, knowing herself a
murderess, whose infamy was still afoot, outpacing her prayers, whose
victims were battalions. Tarpeia and Pisidice and Rahab were her
sisters; she hungered in her abasement for Judith's nobler guilt.

In May he came to her. A truce was patched up and French and English
met amicably in a great plain near Meulan. A square space was staked
out and on three sides boarded in, the fourth side being the river
Seine. This enclosure the Queen-Regent, Jehan of Burgundy, and
Katharine entered from the French side. Simultaneously the English
King appeared, accompanied by his brothers the Dukes of Clarence and
Gloucester, and followed by the Earl of Warwick. Katharine raised her
eyes with I know not what lingering hope; it was he, a young Zeus now,
triumphant and uneager. In his helmet in place of a plume he wore a
fox-brush spangled with jewels.

These six entered the tent pitched for the conference--the hanging of
blue velvet embroidered with fleurs-de-lys of gold blurred before the
girl's eyes, and till death the device sickened her--and there the Earl
of Warwick embarked upon a sea of rhetoric. His French was
indifferent, his periods interminable, and his demands exorbitant; in
brief, the King of England wanted Katharine and most of France, with a
reversion at the French King's death of the entire kingdom. Meanwhile
Sire Henry sat in silence, his eyes glowing.

"I have come," he said, under cover of Warwick's oratory--"I have come
again, my lady."

Katharine's gaze flickered over him. "Liar!" she said, very softly.
"Has God no thunder