okes; but, God's face! what he wanted
was to rouse the look her eyes had borne in Chartres orchard that
tranquil morning, and this one could not readily secure by fiddling
with seals and parchments. You see his position: he loved the Princess
too utterly to take her on lip-consent, and this marriage was now his
one possible excuse for ceasing from victorious warfare. So he
blustered, and the fighting recommenced; and he slew in a despairing
rage, knowing that by every movement of his arm he became to her so
much the more detestable.

He stripped the realm of provinces as you peel the layers from an
onion. By the May of the year of grace 1420 France was, and knew
herself to be, not beaten but demolished. Only a fag-end of the French
army lay entrenched at Troyes, where the court awaited Henry's decision
as to the morrow's action. If he chose to destroy them root and
branch, he could; and they knew such mercy as was in the man to be
quite untarnished by previous usage. He drew up a small force before
the city and made no overtures toward either peace or throat-cutting.

This was the posture of affairs on the evening of the Sunday after
Ascension day, when Katharine sat at cards with her father in his
apartments at the Hotel de Ville. The King was pursing his lips over
an alternative play, when there came the voice of one singing below in
the courtyard.

Sang the voice:

"_I get no joy of my life
That have weighed the world--and it was
Abundant with folly, and rife
With sorrows brittle as glass,
And with joys that flicker and pass
As dreams through a fevered head,
And like the dripping of rain
In gardens naked and dead
Is the obdurate thin refrain
Of our youth which is presently dead._

"_And she whom alone I have loved
Looks ever with loathing on me,
As one she hath seen disproved
And stained with such smirches as be
Not ever cleansed utterly,
And is loth to remember the days
When Destiny fixed her name
As the theme and the goal of my praise,
And my love engenders shame,
And I stain what I strive for and praise._

"_O love, most perfect of all,
Just to have known you is well!
And it heartens me now to recall
That just to have known you is well,
And naught else is desirable
Save only to do as you willed
And to love you my whole life long--
But this heart in me is filled
With hunger cruel and strong,
And wit