On the evening of the day when the great tournament had been fought and won and lost, four of the duchess's favorite women, delicate dissolute minions, waited for their lady's coming in her dimly lit dwelling room. Amicia and Hildeletha, Yelette and Aveline, were huddled together in the alcove of the window, looking out upon the moonlit plain and listening to the sounds of revelry in the rooms below. They had left those rooms, they had left that revelry a little while agone, daintily flushed with wine, daintily prodigal of love-promises, that they might be sure that all was ready for their mistress when she rose from the royal feast. Now they were busy disentangling the imbroglio of their assignations, pitting lover against lover, and trying to remember times and places of meeting, lightly agreed to, and no less lightly forgotten or confused with other trysts. It had been a wonderful day for the merry girls. There was the tournament in the morning with its unexpected end. Then there was the solemn ceremonial of marriage in the afternoon, when the Archbishop of Athens pronounced his benediction on the heir to the dukedom of Athens and the wondrous widow of Thebes. Then came the splendid banquet stretching through the hours. Now in a little while the bridal pair would be conducted in triumph to the duchess's apartments, and speedily thereafter Amicia and Hildeletha, Yelette and Aveline, would be free to pick their paths in pursuit of love. Meanwhile they babbled with bated breath of the duchess, and her old lord, and her many lovers, and of her fire-new groom who seemed to dwell in a dream even while he knelt at the altar. But they marvelled most over the stranger knight, the Prince of Eleusis, the victor of the lists, who came to the banquet habited in white and gold and sat between two of the fairest ladies of Duke Baldwin's court, and while he himself spoke little, listened to their chatter with a bright, indefinable smile. All the women, it seemed, thought him handsome as the day, and the men swore that he was a comely youth, and those that were nigh enough to see noted that he ate no food but fruit and drank no drink but water, and wondered how such meat could feed such vigor. Each of the gossip girls would have been glad to see the conqueror at still closer quarters, for their places at table were far from where he sat. They were experts in the points of men, and would fain have compared him with their immediate lovers. But they watched him closely, and thought that he seemed both merry and sad at the prattle of his companions, and they agreed that if Sir Rainouart kept his eyes ever upon the face of his bride, their Lady Esclaramonde shot many a glance of an admiration they knew well how to interpret at the grave face of the stranger. And therewith the talk swayed lightly back to their lady, the duchess, and the fair heads pressed together and the sweet voices chuckled over the echoes of many scandals.