conferred
on him by a foreign monarch, was invited as a guest to the palace of the
illustrious Count of Dreux. A hundred nobles were there, each exhibiting
all the pageantry of the age; and there, too, were a hundred ladies, vying
with each other in beauty, and in the splendour of their array. But chief
of all was Jolande, the daughter of their host, the Count of Dreux, and the
fame of whose charms had spread throughout Christendom. Troubadours sang of
her beauty, and princes bent the knee before her. Patrick Douglas beheld
her charms. He gazed on them with a mixed feeling of awe, of regret, and of
admiration. His eyes followed her, and his soul followed them. He beheld
the devoirs which the great and the noble paid to her, and his heart was
heavy; for she was the fairest and the proudest flower among the French
nobility --he an exotic weed of desert birth. And, while princes strove for
her hand, he remembered, he felt, that he was an orphan of foreign and of
obscure parentage--a scholar by accident, (but to be a scholar was no
recommendation in those days, and it is but seldom that it is one even
now.) and a soldier of fortune, to whose name royal honours were not
attached, while his purse was light, and who, because his feet covered more
ground than he could call his own, his heels were denied the insignia of
knighthood. Yet, while he ventured not to breathe his thoughts or wishes
before her, he imagined that she looked on him more kindly, and that she
smiled on him more frequently than on his lordly rivals; and his heart
deceived itself, and rejoiced in secret.

Now, it was early in the year 1283, the evening was balmy for the season,
the first spring flowers were budding forth, and the moon, as a silver
crescent, was seen among the stars. The young scholar and soldier of
unknown birth walked in the gardens of the Count of Dreux, and the lovely
Jolande leaned upon his arm. His heart throbbed as he listened to the
silver tones of her sweet voice, and felt the gentle pressure of her soft
hand in his. He forgot that she was the daughter of a prince--he the son of
a dead peasant. In the delirium of a moment, he had thrown himself on his
knee before her, he had pressed her hand on his bosom, and gazed eagerly in
her face.

She was startled by his manner, and had only said--"Sir! what
means?"--though in a tone neither of reproach nor of pride, when what she
would have said was cut short by the sudden approach of a page, w