“Little mistress, your eyes have scared him. Wait till we have our hands in some of De Rohan’s coffers! You shall have the baubles in your pretty lap to play with. Guicheaux, remember the axes. Some of you cut a young tree down; we may need it to break the gate.”
They set to work, and had a young oak down in a twinkling, and cleared the branches from the bole. The two women who were standing by straddled the trunk and made the men carry them, laughing, chattering, and making fun, till Bertrand, turning martinet, ordered them down to mind their business. The shorter of the two caught her skirts on a lopped bough, and had to be rescued amid roars of laughter.
“How you alarmed me!” quoth Guicheaux, as he helped her up. “I feared your linen had not been washed for a month!”
Tiphaïne was brooding before the fire in the solar the day after Le Petit de Fougeres had been buried, when she heard a voice calling to her from the hall.
“Madame Tiphaïne! Madame Tiphaïne!”
Rising, with a rush of hope from her heart, she slipped back the panel in the wall above the dais, through which the lord could look down on his people from the solar, and found Jehanot peering up at her with a cross-bow in his hand. She could see that the man was trembling, whether with joy or fear she could not tell.
“Madame, there are riders in the valley; I have seen them from the tower.”
Tiphaïne remembered the mystic pageant that had been shown her in the basin of black marble.
“Well, Jehanot, well?”