"Ah, it is not that," said Niafer, still rather grim-visaged, but obviously mollified. "It is the life she is leading, with her witchcraft and her familiar spirits and that continual entertaining and excitement, and everybody tells me she has already taken to dyeing her hair."
"Oh, it had plainly had something done to it," says Manuel, lightly. "But it is a queen's duty to preserve such remnants of good looks as she possesses."
"So there, you see!" said Niafer, quite comfortable again in her mind when she noted the careless way in which Dom Manuel spoke of the Queen.
A year or two earlier Dame Niafer would perhaps have been moved to jealousy: now her only concern was that Manuel might possibly be led to make a fool of himself and to upset their manner of living. With every contented wife her husband's general foolishness is an axiom, and prudent philosophers do not distinguish here between cause and effect.
As for Alianora's wanting to take Manuel as a lover, Dame Niafer found the idea mildly amusing, and very nicely indicative of those washed-out, yellow-haired women's intelligence. To be harboring romantic notions about Manuel seemed to Manuel's wife so fantastically out of reason that she half wished the poor creature could without scandal be afforded a chance to find out for herself all about Manuel's thousand and one finicky ways and what he was in general to live with.
That being impossible, Niafer put the crazy woman out of mind, and began to tell Manuel about what had happened, and not for the first time either, while he was away, and about just how much more she was going to stand from Sister Math, and about the advantages of a perfectly plain understanding for everybody concerned. And with Niafer that was the end of Count Manuel's discharging of his obligation to Alianora.
Of course there were gossips who said this, that and the other. Some asserted that Manuel's tale in itself contained elements of improbability: others declared that Queen Alianora, who was far deeplier versed in the magic of the Apsarasas than was Dom Manuel, could just as well have summoned the stork without his assistance. It was true the stork was under no especial obligations to Alianora: even so, said these gossips, it would have looked far better, and a queen could not be too particular, and it simply showed you about these foreign Southern women; and although they of course wished to misjudge no one, there was no sense in pretending to ignore what everybody practically knew to be a fact, and was talking about everywhere, and some day you would see for yourself.
But after all, Dom Manuel and the Queen were the only persons qualified to speak of these matters with authority, and this was Dom Manuel's account of them. For the rest, he was sustained against tittle-tattle by the knowledge that he had performed a charitable deed in England, for the Queen's popularity was enhanced, and all the English, but particularly their King, were delighted, by the fine son which the stork duly brought to Alianora the following June.
Manuel never saw this boy, who afterward ruled over England and was a highly thought-of warrior, nor did Dom Manuel ever see Queen Alianora any more. So Alianora goes out of the story, to bring long years of misery and ruining wars upon the English, and to Dom Manuel no more beguilements. For they say Dom Manuel could never resist her, because of that underlying poverty in the correct emotions which, as some say, Dom Manuel shared with her, and which they hid from all the world except each other.
