And he also laughed a little, but bitterly. Eleanor raised her smooth brows and spoke with a touch of irony.
"Are you so young, and have you already such desperate sorrows?"
But as she looked, his face changed, with that look of real and cruel suffering which none can counterfeit. He leaned back against the penthouse, looking straight before him. Then she, seeing that she had touched the nerve in an unhealed wound, glanced sidelong at him, bit upon her sprig of rosemary again, turned, and with half-bent head walked slowly along to the next buttress; she turned again there, and coming back stood close before him, laying one hand upon his folded arm and looking up to his eyes, that gazed persistently over her head.
"I would not hurt you for the world," she said very gravely. "I mean to be your friend, your best friend—do you understand?"
Gilbert looked down and saw her upturned face. It should have moved him even then, he thought, and perhaps he did not himself know that between her and him there was the freezing shadow of a faint likeness to his mother.
"You are kind, Madam," he said, somewhat formally. "A poor squire without home or fortune can hardly be the friend of the Queen of France."
She drew back from him half a step, but her outstretched hand still rested on his arm.
"What have lands and fortune to do with friendship—or with love?" she asked. "Friendship's home is in the hearts of men and women; friendship's fortune is friendship's faith."
"Ay, Madam, so it should be," answered Gilbert, his voice warming in a fuller tone.
"Then be my friend," she said, and her hand turned itself palm upward, asking for his.