begun to set forth all this and much more in a letter to Pope Eugenius,
but before he had written a dozen lines the pen had fallen from his
hand, and he had begun to reflect upon the impossibility of stemming
the tide since it had turned to flood.

A soft step sounded in the outer hall beyond the curtained doorway, but
Bernard, absorbed in his meditations, heard nothing. A jewelled hand
pushed aside the thick folds of the hanging, and the most beautiful
eyes in the world gazed curiously upon the unheeding abbot.

"Are you alone?" asked the Queen's voice.

Without waiting for an answer she came forward into the room and paused
beside the low platform, laying one hand upon the table in a gesture
half friendly, half deprecating, as if she still feared that she had
disturbed the holy man. His transparent fingers fell from his eyes, and
he looked up to her, hardly realizing who she was, and quite unable to
guess why she had come. A dark brown mantle completely covered her
gown, and only a little of her scarlet sleeve showed as her hand lay on
the table. Her russet-golden hair hung in broad waves and lightened in
the rays of the oil lamp. Her eyes, that looked at Bernard intently and
inquiringly, were the eyes of old Duke William, whom the Abbot of
Clairvaux had brought to confession and penance long ago, and who had
gone from the altar of his grand-daughter's marriage straight to
solitary hermitage and lonely death in the Spanish hills; they were
eyes in which all thoughts were fearless and in which tenderness was
beautiful, but in which kindness was often out of sight behind the
blaze of vitality and the burning love of life that proceeded from her
and surrounded her as an atmosphere of her own.