One inventive personage declared he knew (upon positive authority) that the little Vidame had come on an important secret mission of the French King anent the necessity of Romanising the English Church without delay. “Vidame, mark you, is an old French ecclesiastical title,” he was good enough to explain. “He holds his lands in feu from some mighty Archbishopric—formerly a Vidame was a kind of ecclesiastical marshal—does not this furnish food for reflection, my lords? But—” “Pooh,” cried an airy gallant (who had a French tilt to his moustache), “our good Dorset has ever Rome in his head. Why, man, a Vidame and his Bishop, it is well known, always hate each other cordially as ever fox and wolf; ’tis always between them, who shall have the fattest share of church booty! Nay, then, are you so simple? Have you looked at that smooth cheek, those rich curls? Why, ’tis the most piquant matter—some Fair Audacity in disguise! No more Vidame than your lordship’s self; but, believe me, some cosy little chanoinesse, sheltering her gentle lapses under the comfortable wing of Mother Church.”—“Hearken to Follett and his follies!” interposed a third, a frank-faced youth, the sap of whose English generous common-sense had not yet been withered by courtly poisons. “Nay, neither envoy nor canoness, my lords, but as tough a youth as ever I came across. I tried a fall with him, in the Cockpit,—having heard him brag of a trick of Breton wrestling,—and by my soul, the lad is steel and bow-string; he had me on my back in a twinkling and jeered at me till, for a moment, I saw him in red! But I like the lad; he has mettle, for all his whey face. Heard you not what his Majesty calls him: his Little Satan!—Old Rowley hath some bit of devil’s work for him this morning. And that’s the nut of the mystery.” “Well, Vidame,” said the King, as soon as they were out of earshot, “let us now arrange the hour when we are again to hear your melodious sister warble, as though she were a bird and found our dull skies as bright as those of France.” Enguerrand’s lips trembled. His pale cheek grew paler still. But he had by no means been prepared to reveal his diplomatic failure. His plan was to temporise, in the hope of eventual success. But his sensitive acuteness nosed a trail of bitter temper under all Charles’s urbanity; and, flustered, he hesitated a second. The King drew his great eyebrows together. “Madame requires pressing, it seems. She is perhaps hoarse to-day.” Enguerrand foresaw how, in another moment, by a gesture of that languid white hand, the insignificant personality of Jeanne—and with it his own equally futile existence—would be swept from Charles’s horizon. Biting his lips, he cast about, but vainly, in his own brain, for a word which would keep the King’s fickle humour at least a little longer on the same bent.