"A woman," repeated the Bishop. "You grow rough up here on your hillside. Only a few months since the lady your wife went away, and already order has forsaken you. The child, your daughter, runs like a wild thing, without control. Our Holy Church deplores these things."
"Will Holy Church grant me another wife?"
"Holy Church," replied the Bishop gravely, "would have you take back, my lord, the wife whom your hardness drove away."
The seigneur's gaze turned to the east, where lay the Castle of Philip, his cousin. Then he dropped brooding eyes to the Square below, where the girl Joan assisted her father by the fire, and moved like a mother of kings.
"You wish a woman for the castle, father," he said. "Then a woman we shall have. Holy Church may not give me another wife, but I shall take one. And I shall have a son."
The child Clotilde had watched it all from a window. Because she was very high the thing she saw most plainly was the cross on the donkey's back. Far out over the plain was a moving figure which might or might not have been the Jew. She chose to think it was.
"One of Your people," she said toward the crucifix. "I have done the good deed."
She was a little frightened, for all her high head.
Other Christmases she and the lady her mother had sat hand in hand, and listened to the roystering.