nightingales. "Then caught she up her kirtle in both hands, behind and
before, and flitted over the dew that lay deep on the grass, and fled out
of the garden, and the daisy flowers bending below her tread seemed dark
against her feet, so white was the maiden." Can't you see her stealing
with those "feet of ivory," like Bombyca's, down the dark side of the
silent moonlit streets of Beaucaire?

Then she came where Aucassin was lamenting in his cell, and she whispered
to him how she was fleeing for her life. And he answered that without
her he must die; and then this foolish pair, in the very mouth of peril,
must needs begin a war of words as to which loved the other best!

"Nay, fair sweet friend," saith Aucassin, "it may not be that thou lovest
me more than I love thee. Woman may not love man as man loves woman, for
a woman's love lies no deeper than in the glance of her eye, and the
blossom of her breast, and her foot's tip-toe; but man's love is in his
heart planted, whence never can it issue forth and pass away."

So while they speak

"In debate as birds are,
Hawk on bough,"

comes the kind sentinel to warn them of a danger. And Nicolette flees,
and leaps into the fosse, and thence escapes into a great forest and
lonely. In the morning she met shepherds merry over their meat, and bade
them tell Aucassin to hunt in that forest, where he should find a deer
whereof one glance would cure him of his malady. The shepherds are
happy, laughing people, who half mock Nicolette, and quite mock Aucassin,
when he comes that way. But at first they took Nicolette for a _fee_,