perusals of her portrait, now appeared besotted. He was an aging man,
near sixty, huge and fair, with a crisp beard, and the bright unequal
eyes of Manuel of Poictesme. The better-read at Mezelais began to liken
this so candidly enamored monarch and his Princess to Sieur Hercules at
the feet of Queen Omphale.

The court hunted and slew a stag of ten in the woods of Ermenoueïl,
which stand thick about the château; and at the hunt's end, these two
had dined at Rigon the forester's hut, in company with Dame Meregrett,
the French King's younger sister. She sat a little apart from the
betrothed, and stared through the hut's one window. We know, nowadays,
it was not merely the trees she was considering.

Dame Blanch seemed undisposed to mirth. "We have slain the stag, beau
sire," she said, "and have made of his death a brave diversion. To-day
we have had our sport of death,--and presently the gay years wind past
us, as our cavalcade came toward the stag, and God's incurious angel
slays us, much as we slew the stag. And we shall not understand, and we
shall wonder, as the stag did, in helpless wonder. And Death will have
his sport of us, as if in atonement." Her big eyes shone, as when the
sun glints upon a sand-bottomed pool. "Ohé, I have known such happiness
of late, beau sire, that I am hideously afraid to die."

The King answered, "I too have been very happy of late."

"But it is profitless to talk about death thus drearily. Let us flout
him, instead, with some gay song." And thereupon she handed Sire Edward
a lute.

The King accepted it. "Death is not reasonably mocked by any person,"