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“You are too subtle for me, sire,” he would confess. “I can begin by winning, that is easy. When I have beaten you, you laugh, and turn to show me what a child I am.”

The chess-players were so intent above, that Gaillard and the lute girl Etoile, had the half hour safely to themselves. They were blood cousins—these two Gascons, and yet nearer of kin in the intimate ambition that had sent them hunting in a strange land. How the Lady of the Peacocks had persuaded Peter of Savoy into loving her would be a tale fit for a French song. She could do very much as she pleased with him so long as he was not hanging his dyed beard over the chess-board. As for her and Gaillard, they understood one another. The man was driven at times to be rash and impetuous. Etoile was strange and fierce enough at a crisis to keep Gaillard’s galloping passion from breaking its own neck.

These two Gascons had a common enemy, Barnabo the Italian, who was as clever as Etoile, and far more clever than Gaillard. The chaplain was a smooth man, a man who smiled when he was snubbed, and put the insult carefully into the counting-house of his memory. There was sometimes a glitter in his eyes, like the gleam of a knife hidden in a sleeve. He hated Etoile, and Etoile the woman, knew why he hated her. Barnabo would have had her for an accomplice, the Queen on the chess-board to play against Count Peter. Etoile had struck Barnabo across the face, and the chess-board and the lute had been at feud with one another. Peter of Savoy knew nothing of all this. Both Barnabo and Etoile were too wise to throw soot at one another, unless the chance should come when one could be safely blackened without so much as a pinch of slander falling upon the other.