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“Better at a man’s heart, than at his head, dear lady.”

“A Gascon has more head than heart, my friend.”

“And a long sword, and a longer tongue!”

She tilted her chin, two black eyes laughing above a short, impudent nose, and a hard, red mouth.

“Go and have your gossip with good Peter. Barnabo has beaten him twice at chess, and he was ready to throw the board at me. The leopards are better tempered.”

Gaillard snapped his fingers.

“I will be a leopard,” he said. “Wait till I have washed the dust off. Peter always plays until he wins.”

The white face disappeared behind the cypress boughs, and Gaillard rode on to his quarters, ready to wash the dust of the road away with wine and water, and thinking of Etoile, Count Peter’s lutanist and lady. She was a Gascon also from the land of the Garonne. Etoile and Gaillard were excellent friends, especially when the Savoyard was playing chess.

There were peacocks strutting in the garden, sunning their gorgeous tails, when Gaillard fresh from the bath and the hands of his man, went out to Etoile among the cypresses. At the window above Peter of Savoy had his head over the chess-board. The game was such a passion with him, that his people left him in the throes of it, not even Etoile being allowed to touch her lute. The Savoyard, chin on the palm of his left hand, with Barnabo opposite him, had not so much as noticed Gaillard’s return. The men had ridden to their quarters, but Peter’s long fingers loitered over the board, and his ears might have been stuffed with wool. Barnabo, who had won two games, had enough worldly wisdom behind his smooth, Italian face to know that the time had come to put his lord in a happier temper. Barnabo always rose from the board a loser. It was part of his policy to pique the great man by defeating him at first, that he might delight him the more with the inevitable revenge.