“I will not trust you!” she screamed
I saw that slim soldier Flamaucœur groan within his helmet at this, then down he bent. “Mad, mad girl!” I heard him say, and then followed a whisper which was lost between his hollow helmet and his prisoner’s ear. Whatever it was, the effect was instantaneous and wonderful.
“Impossible!” burst out the French girl, starting away as far as the cords would let her, and eyeing her captor with surprise and amazement.
“’Tis truth, I swear it.”
“Oh, impossible!—thou a——”
“Hush, hush,” cried Flamaucœur, putting his hand upon the girl’s mouth, and speaking again to her in his soft low voice, and as he did so her eyes ran over him, the fear and wonder slowly melted away, and then, presently, with a delighted smile at length shining behind her undried tears, she clasped and kissed his hand with a vast show of delight as ungoverned as her grief had been, and when he had freed her and descended from his charger, to our amazement, led rather than followed that knight most willing to his tent, and there let fall the flap behind them.
“Now that,” said the King’s jester, who had come up while this matter was passing—“that is what I call a truly persuasive tongue. I would give half my silver bells to know what magic that gentleman has that will get reason so quickly into an angry woman’s head.”
“If you knew that,” quoth a stern old knight through the steel bars of his morion, “you might live a happy life, although you knew nothing else.”
“Poor De Burgh!” whispered a soldier near me. “He speaks with knowledge, for men say he owns a vixen, and is more honored and feared here by the proud Frenchman than at his own fireside.”
“Perhaps,” suggested another to the laughing group, “he of the burning heart whispered that he had a double Indulgence in his tent. Women will go anywhere and do anything when it is the Church which leads them by the nose.”