The friar gathered his brushes, and took breath. "Hast thou found thy Beatrice, O my son?" "Have I gazed into heaven?" Balthasar’s voice filled the chapel. "Live, sire, live!" he said. "Ah!" "Be mad! Drink star wine, and snuff the odours of all the sunsets! Live, live! You can repent in comfort when you are sixty and measure fifty inches round the waist." XIV Dame Duessa had come to Avalon, having heard certain whisperings of Gilderoy, and of a golden-haired Astarte who kept house there. Dame Duessa was a proud woman and a passionate, headstrong as a reformer, jealous as a parish priest. She boasted a great ancestry and a great name, and desires and convictions in keeping. She was a woman who loved her robe cupboard, her jewel-case, and her bed. Moreover, she pretended some affection for the Lord Flavian her husband, perhaps arrogance of ownership, seeing that Dame Duessa was very determined to keep him in bonded compact with herself. She suspected that the man did not consider her a saint, or worship her as such. Yet, termagant that she was, Dame Duessa could suffer some trampling of empty sentiment, provided Fate did not rob her of her share in the broad demesne and rent-roll of Gambrevault. Avalon was a castle of ten towers, linked by a strong curtain wall, and built about a large central court and garden. A great moat circled the whole, a moat broad and silvery as a lake, with water-lilies growing thick in the shallows. Beyond the moat, sleek meadows tufted with green rushes swept to the gnarled piers of the old oaks that vanguarded the forest. The black towers slumbered in a mist of green, girded with sheeny water, tented by the azure of a southern sky. Dame Duessa, being a lady of silks and tissues, did not love the place with all her soul. Avalon of the Orchards was dull, and smacked of Arcady; it was far removed from that island of fair sin, Lauretia, the King’s city. Moreover, the Lord Flavian and his ungallant gentlemen held rigorously to the northern turrets, leaving her to lodge ascetically in her rich chamber in a southern tower. Her husband contrived to exile himself as far as Castle Avalon could suffer him. If the pair went to mass, they went separately, with the frigid hauteur of an Athanasius handing an Aryus over to hell. When they hunted they rode towards opposite stars. No children had chastened them, pledges of heaven-given life. The Lady Duessa detested ought that hinted at caudle, swaddling-clothes, and cradles. Moreover, all Avalon seemed in league with the Lord Flavian. Knights, esquires, scullions, horse-boys swore by him as though he were a Bayard. Dame Duessa could rely solely on a prig of a page, and a lady-in-waiting who wore a wig, and perhaps on Fra Balthasar, the Dominican.