The windows were of finest glass,
Painted with red hearts and silver crowns,
And the scent of her chamber was as the scent of May.
“Good words, Master Fulk—hey?”
“Why sing about maids with golden hair? And roses and violets don’t bloom together. Make a song about a hawk, or a bow, or a sword.”
“Some day, if it please you, I will sing of the sword, and perhaps of a broomstick. Raw apples should not grumble at sugar.”
Below them in a little valley between oak woods the White Lodge showed up under the moon. It was a great, low house of black beams and white plaster, thatched so thickly with heather that the shaggy eaves were two feet thick. The White Lodge lay in the lap of a narrow meadow, with stables, barns, and outbuildings clustered behind it, their steep roofs, black ridged, looking like the roofs of a little town. The oak woods made a dark shelter about the silver sheen of the meadowland. By the orchard a stew pond blinked at the moon. Stout palisades of rough timber shut in the house, outbuildings, courtyard, and garden.
Isoult of the Rose stood at gaze.
“I see the cage,” said she. “Tell me, will you let the bird go—or cage it?”
“The caged thrush sings on a sunny morning.”