“There are eyes over yonder that look round corners and through bushes. The red beard is watching us, his head all swaddled up so that he looks like an old woman in a wimple.”
“That fool! He must have his tongue and his nose in everything! I can play with such bumblebees.”
She stood up and called the swashbuckler.
“Guy, hallo there—friend Guy!”
The Stallion came out from behind a holly bush, carrying his sword on his shoulder, the red twists of his beard ferocious as ever.
“Bring me Blanche’s lute. I saw her over yonder as I came through the wood; and for my touching of her strings she can boast of Isoult as her comrade.”
Guy saluted Isoult with his sword, and disappeared into the beech wood, where Blanche was sitting in a shelter of boughs under a tree, mending a hole in her hose, one bare foot thrust out, her hair bundled up anyhow in a torn net. Her lute lay in a red bag beside her, but as to lending it to Isoult that was another matter. Guy had but to grab at the thing for her to scratch at his face and start screaming like a jay.
Isoult laughed.
“Between them they will break the strings, yet I shall get the lute.”
The squabble was soon over, Big Blanche’s voice oozing away into a futile whimpering that was smothered by the big oaths and blasphemies of her man. She had wriggled away and was cowering against the tree trunk in order to escape from a foot that was none too delicate in the use of its big toe.