"I shall not stay, my lord," said the Bishop. "The thing is desecration.
No good can come from such a bond. It is Christmas and the Truce of God,
and yet you do this evil thing."

So the Bishop went, muffled in a cloak, and mantled with displeasure.
And with him, now that Clotilde had fled, went all that was good and
open to the sun, from the grey castle of Charles the Fair.

At evening Joan came again, still afoot, but now clad in her best. She
came alone, and the men at the gates, instructed, let her in. She gazed
around the courtyard with its burden of grain that had been crushed out
of her people below, with its loitering soldiers and cackling fowls, and
she shivered as the gates closed behind her.

She was a good girl, as the times went, and she knew well that she had
been brought up the hill as the stallion that morning had been driven
down. She remembered the cut of the whip, and in the twilight of the
courtyard she stretched out her arms toward the little town below, where
the old man, her father, lived in semi-darkness, and where on that
Christmas evening the women were gathered in the churches to pray.

* * * * *

Having no seasonable merriment in himself, Charles surrounded himself
that night with cheer. A band of wandering minstrels had arrived to
sing, the great fire blazed, the dogs around it gnawed the bones of the
Christmas feast. But when the troubadours would have sung of the
Nativity, he bade them in a great voice to have done. So they sang of
war, and, remembering his cousin Philip, his eyes blazed.