It happened, unfortunately for our troubadour, that he won too many hearts. Raised by the Lord of Roussillon to the rank of gentleman usher to the Lady Marguerite, his young and beautiful wife, the graces and accomplishments of Guillaume de Cabestaign, soon became quite as apparent and agreeable to her as to the meanest of the damsels in her train. She was never so well satisfied as in his society; and her young and ardent soul, repelled rather than solicited by the stern nature of Raymond, her lord, was better prepared and pleased to sympathize with the more beguiling and accessible spirit of the page. The tenderest impressions of love, without her own knowledge, soon seized upon her heart; and she had learned to sigh as she gazed upon the person that she favored, long before she entertained the slightest consciousness that he was at all precious to her eyes. He himself, dutiful as devoted, for a long season beheld none of these proofs of favor on the part of his noble mistress. She called him her servant, it is true, and he as such, sung daily in her praises the equal language of the lover and the knight. These were words, however, of specific and conventional meaning, to which her husband listened with indifferent ear. In those days every noble lady entertained a lover, who was called her servant. It was a prerogative of nobility that such should be the case. It spoke for the courtliness and aristocracy of the party; and to be without a lover, though in the possession of a husband, was to be an object of scornful sympathy in the eyes of the sex. Fashion, in other words, had taken the name of chivalry; and it was one of her regulations that the noble lady should possess a lover, who should of necessity be other than her lord. In this capacity, Raymond of Roussillon, found nothing of which to complain in the devotion of Guillaume de Cabestaign to Marguerite, his wife. But the courtiers who gathered in her train were not so indulgent, or were of keener sight. They soon felt the preference which she gave, over all others, to our troubadour. They felt, and they resented it the more readily, as they were not insensible to his personal superiority. Guillaume himself, was exceeding slow in arriving at a similar consciousness. Touched with a fonder sentiment for his mistress than was compatible with his security, his modesty had never suffered him to suppose that he had been so fortunate as to inspire her with a feeling such as he now knew within himself. It was at a moment when he least looked for it, that he made the perilous discovery. It was in the course of a discussion upon the various signs of love—such a discussion as occupied the idle hours, and the wandering fancies of chivalry—that she said to him, somewhat abruptly,