"But what was it all about?" he asked, laying his hand upon her hair, for he was tender of her.
"How could I presume to tell?" she asked, with a grieved red lip. "'Twas too wonderful to put into words;" and she swept from the room, with no glance for her lover.
Young merchant Hugh, to whom the very rushes on which the maiden stepped were dear because of his great speechless love, gazed after her, jealous of the look upon her face, and cruelly wounded by her scorn.
"I will find out the trick," said the young man to himself, between set teeth; and he was one who ever made good his words.
Now the maiden Blanche was glad when her lover begged to go forth with her the next day and the next, at two P.M.
"Mayhap he may learn something of this wondrous speech," she said wistfully, thinking to herself that it would be sweet to be wooed in violet words and words of the color of gold. When he bent shyly to kiss her before they went, with lips that trembled for the great love they might not say, she drew stiffly back, nor would she thereafter permit touch or caress, and much she spoke of the joy of a maiden's life that would leave time free for thought; yet she took him gladly with her for a week of days. Ever he listened, as one spellbound, nor once removed his glance from the Necromancer's face; and he was keen of eye, and wont in traffic to detect word or look of fraud, and he saw what no one else had seen.
"I have it!" he cried, and he slapped his fist upon the palm of his left hand. "Those be bags of many-colored words that he hath with him, and he but sucks them up and breathes them forth."
That day he sent his sweetheart home with Dame Cartelet, that lived hard by, and was as besotted as she on the man with the magic words; then he went and lay in wait in the street through which the Necromancer passed each day in going home; and as he waited, he turned back his velvet cuffs, and felt lovingly of the muscle of shoulder and arm. So it was not long before a tall man in drab went running through the narrow streets on the outskirts of the town, crying and wringing his hands, and the rattling bags of rose color, and purple, and gold were gone from his neck.
"Oh, my vocabulary!" he wailed. "Oh, my bags, my bags, my bags! What am I but a man undone without my bag of adjectives!"
The dogs and the children that ran at his heels did not understand, nor did smith and weaver as they stood in their doorways.