With an almost imperceptible gesture, like a greeting, she disappeared.
Gilbert began to walk up and down, his hands behind him, his eyes on
the ground, and he did not see the tennis-ball which Henry had lost
until he almost stumbled over it. The boy's words had roused an
entirely new train of ideas in his mind. Perhaps no man could be so
free from vanity as not to be pleased, even against his will, with the
thought that the most beautiful living woman, and she a queen, was in
love with him. But whatever satisfaction of that sort Gilbert may have
felt was traversed in an opposite direction by the cool sense of his
own indifference. And besides, that was a simple age in which sins were
called by their own names and were regarded with a sort of semi-
religious, respectful abhorrence by most honest gentlemen; and what was
only the general expression of a narrow but high morality had been
branded upon Gilbert's soul during the past months in letters that were
wounds by the ever-present memory of his own mother's shame.

The confusion of his reflections was simplified by the appearance of
Queen Eleanor. At the window of the lower story, which opened to the
ground, she stepped out, looked up and down the deserted yard, and then
came towards him. Gilbert had been long enough in Paris to understand
that Queen Eleanor had not the slightest regard for the set rules,
formal prejudices, and staid traditions of her husband's court; and
when King Louis gravely protested against her dressing herself in man's
mail, bestriding his own favourite charger, and tilting at the Saracen
quintain in the yard, she hinted with more or less good or ill nature,
according to her mood, that her possessions were considerably more
extensive than the kingdom of France, and that what she had been taught
to do by William of Aquitaine was necessarily right, and beyond the
criticism of Louis Capet, who was descended from a Paris butcher.
Nevertheless, the Englishman had some reasonable doubts and misgivings