Villon, who had been listening to her in wonder, started as if he had been struck anew.
"Oh, it was he?" he interrupted. The girl came a little closer, became a little more confidential.
"He gave your rhymes to me and told me how you had been treated. When I read them I said—here, if a poet speaks truth, is the one man in France who can help me."
Villon drew himself back with a little shiver of intelligence. The lumes of wine, the fumes of wonder were drifting away from him, leaving him face to face with naked, amazing reality.
"Why not your yellow-haired, pink-faced lover?" he asked. Katherine frowned disdain.
"Noel le Jolys is a man many women might love, but I love no man; I only hate Thibaut d'Aussigny. Do you understand?"
"I begin to understand," Villon answered, sadly.
The girl came nearer to Villon. Her face was very pale in the dim light, and a fleeting image of the moon in clouds teased his fancy. Her lips were as red, he thought, as the ruby of a bishop's ring, and her eyes out-starred Venus. So it was he who trembled and not the maiden who was saying strange unmaiden-like words in a clear, steel-like whisper.
"Kill Thibaut d'Aussigny. You are a skillful swordsman, they say. You are little better than an outlaw. You say you love me more than life. Kill Thibaut d'Aussigny!"
Villon looked at her queerly. To save his life he could not keep his face from quivering. He was eating his heart and it tasted very bitter, and his own voice sounded far away to him, like a voice heard in a dream.