"He saved me yesterday—not you," answered the Queen, cruelly, and she remembered his eyes. "Does a man risk his life desperately, as he did, for the woman he loves, or for another, when both are in like danger?"
"It was not you, it was the Queen he saved. It is right that a loyal man should save his sovereign first. I do not blame him. I should not have blamed him had I been more hurt than I am."
"I am not his sovereign, and he is no vassal of mine." Eleanor smiled coldly. "He is an Englishman."
"You play with words," answered Beatrix, as she would have spoken to an equal.
"Take care!"
They faced each other, and on the instant the fierce pride of royalty sprang up, as at an insult. But Beatrix was brave—a sick girl against the Queen of France.
"If you are not his sovereign, you are not mine," she said. "And were you ten times my Queen, there can be no fence of royalty between you and me from this hour, or if there is, you are doubly playing with the meaning of what your lips say. Are you to be a woman to me, a woman, at one moment, and a sovereign to me, a subject, at the next? Which is it to be?"
"A woman, then, if nothing more. And as a woman, I tell you that I will have Gilbert Warde for myself, body and soul."
The girl's eyes lightened suddenly. Men said that in her mother's veins there had run some of the Conqueror's blood, and his great oath sprang to her lips as she answered:—
"And by the splendour of God, I tell you that you shall not!"