"Not often enough, you think? And you--too often. Always, indeed."

"If I were Queen of France, I could be light-hearted, too," said
Gilbert. "But if your Grace were Gilbert Warde, you should be perhaps a
sadder man than I."

And he also laughed a little, but bitterly. Eleanor raised her smooth
brows and spoke with a touch of irony.

"Are you so young, and have you already such desperate sorrows?"

But as she looked, his face changed, with that look of real and cruel
suffering which none can counterfeit. He leaned back against the
penthouse, looking straight before him. Then she, seeing that she had
touched the nerve in an unhealed wound, glanced sidelong at him, bit
upon her sprig of rosemary again, turned, and with half-bent head
walked slowly along to the next buttress; she turned again there, and
coming back stood close before him, laying one hand upon his folded arm
and looking up to his eyes, that gazed persistently over her head.

"I would not hurt you for the world," she said very gravely. "I mean to
be your friend, your best friend--do you understand?"

Gilbert looked down and saw her upturned face. It should have moved him
even then, he thought, and perhaps he did not himself know that between
her and him there was the freezing shadow of a faint likeness to his
mother.

"You are kind, Madam," he said, somewhat formally. "A poor squire
without home or fortune can hardly be the friend of the Queen of