“It is true,” she responded, “it is lamentably true that after to-night we are as different persons, you and I.”
He said: “Jehane, do you not love me any longer? Remember old years and do not break your oath with me, Jehane, since God abhors nothing so much as unfaith. For your own sake, Jehane,—ah, no, not for your sake nor for mine, but for the sake of that blithe Jehane, whom, so you tell me, time has slain!”
Once or twice she blinked, as if dazzled by a light of intolerable splendor, but otherwise she stayed rigid. “You have dared, messire, to confront me with the golden-hearted, clean-eyed Navarrese that once was I! and I requite.” The austere woman rose. “Messire, you swore to me, long since, eternal service. I claim my right in domnei. Yonder—gray-bearded, the man in black and silver—is the Earl of Worcester, the King of England’s ambassador, in common with whom the wealthy dowager of Brittany has signed a certain contract. Go you, then, with Worcester into England, as my proxy, and in that island, as my proxy, become the wife of the King of England. Messire, your audience is done.”
Riczi said this: “Can you hurt me any more, Jehane?—no, even in hell they cannot hurt me now. Yet I, at least, keep faith, and in your face I fling faith like a glove—old-fashioned, it may be, but clean,—and I will go, Jehane.”
Her heart raged. “Poor, glorious fool!” she thought; “had you but the wit even now to use me brutally, even now to drag me from this daïs—!” Instead he went away from her smilingly, treading through the hall with many affable salutations, while the jongleur sang.
Sang the jongleur:
“There is a land those hereabout
Ignore ... Its gates are barred
By Titan twins, named Fear and Doubt.
These mercifully guard