Now, to my thinking, this youth is brother or lover to the maiden
Blanchefleur.'

'No brother but her lover am I!' cried Fleur in glad surprise; then
bethinking him how by such heedless speech his life was put in peril,
he cried again: 'No! no! I don't mean that; I am brother and not lover
to Blanchefleur. We are children of the same parents.'

'With all respect for your word, young sir, you contradict yourself in
one breath,' said Daries the host. 'Best speak the truth out plainly as,
forsooth, I now do in declaring that it were madness to come in quest of
the maiden Blanchefleur; for, if the Admiral but hears of you, you are a
dead man.'

[Illustration]

'Sir,' said Fleur, 'hear the whole truth--I am son to the King of Spain,
and seek my stolen Blanchefleur, without whom I cannot live; help me to
her, and I will give you gold to your heart's content, for ere another
moon has waxed and waned, find her I must or die.'

'Life,' replied Daries, 'were ill lost for sake of a maiden, whom no aid
of mine can make your own, seeing that not, were the whole world to help
you, could Blanchefleur be taken from the Admiral, Lord of a hundred
kings, whose city Babylon is a four-square of twenty miles, and has for
its defence walls full seventy feet in height, built of a stone so hard
that no engine of war from enemies without can pierce their stony front,
and in these walls are three-and-thirty doors of solid steel let in with
cunning art, and high uplifted are seven hundred towers, the loftiest
ever seen by mortal eye, and these towers are guarded by seven hundred