Sir Jeoffry dragged at his horse's mouth and swore again.

"She was fifteen then, and had not given me nine yellow-faced wenches,"
he said. "Tell her I had gone a-hunting and you were too late;" and he
struck his big black beast with the whip, and it bounded away with him,
hounds and huntsmen and fellow-roysterers galloping after, his guests,
who had caught at the reason of his wrath, grinning as they rode.

* * * * *

In a huge chamber hung with tattered tapestries and barely set forth with
cumbersome pieces of furnishing, my lady lay in a gloomy, canopied bed,
with her new-born child at her side, but not looking at or touching it,
seeming rather to have withdrawn herself from the pillow on which it lay
in its swaddling-clothes.

She was but a little lady, and now, as she lay in the large bed, her face
and form shrunken and drawn with suffering, she looked scarce bigger than
a child. In the brief days of her happiness those who toasted her had
called her Titania for her fairy slightness and delicate beauty, but then
her fair wavy locks had been of a length that touched the ground when her
woman unbound them, and she had had the colour of a wild rose and the
eyes of a tender little fawn. Sir Jeoffry for a month or so had paid
tempestuous court to her, and had so won her heart with his dashing way
of love-making and the daringness of his reputation, that she had thought
herself--being child enough to think so--the luckiest young lady in the
world that his black eye should have fallen upon her with favour. Each
year since, with the bearing of each child, she had lost some of her
beauty. With each one her lovely hair fell out still more, her wild-rose