She strove with her passion a while, and then she said: "Great Lord, I pray thee to hearken, and to have patience with a woman's weak heart. Prithee, sit down here beside me.

"It were unfitting," he said; "I shall take a lowlier seat." Then he drew a stool to him, and sat down before her, and said: "What aileth thee? What wouldest thou?"

Then she said: "Lord Earl, I am in prison; I would be free."

Quoth he: "Yea, and is this a prison, then?"

"Yea," she said, "since I may not so much as go out from it and come back again unthreatened; yet have I been, and that unseldom, in a worser prison than this: do thou go look on the Least Guard-chamber, and see if it be a meet dwelling for thy master's daughter."

He spake nought awhile; then he said: "And, yet if it grieveth thee, it marreth thee nought; for when I look on thee mine eyes behold the beauty of the world, and the body wherein is no lack."

She reddened and said: "If it be so, it is God's work, and I praise him therefor. But how long will it last? For grief slayeth beauty."

He looked on her long, and said: "To thy friends I betook thee, and I looked that they should cherish thee; where then is the wrong that I have done thee?"