Fernand Ximenes was sorely displeased at the news, but he protested pleasure with the best, persistently patient. Everybody else was hugely delighted, for this sudden marriage put the perfect top to all the jollity--it was the cream on the milk of mirth, the finest feather in the cap of happiness. Of course the opinions of the gentlefolk were the only opinions that counted, but in their obscurity the citizens of Athens made merry with the rest, for the waves of great folk's pleasure always carried some flotsam and jetsam to their humble thresholds. As for those dark subalterns of St. Nicholas, Captain Fox and Captain Gander, Captain Bat and Captain Chanticleer, Captain Rat and Captain Badger, they were neck-high in delights, and drank of the best daily and nightly in popular taverns, toasting bride and groom mellifluously, and thanking their saint and their stars that they by a storm and a strange voice were stayed from slitting the weasand of the son of Duke Baldwin the Beneficent. On the morning of the marriage-day the great court-yard of Duke Baldwin's palace was a little world of many types and many nationalities. From the gallery of the palace the loveliest ladies of the court looked down upon the flower of the French chivalry below and named their names to new-arrived beauties, and told tales of them, not always without malice. The slender fellow with the yellow hair was Sir Guy de Hainault. The gallant with the brown curls who sat apart and nursed a lute upon his knee was Sir Jaufre de Brabant. That lean, dark, strenuous figure, his visage bronzed by Spanish suns, the man with something Moorish in his garb and accoutrements, was Fernand Ximenes, chief among the leaders of the Catalan Grand Company. The portly, florid man, no longer young but comely in his prime, who carried a white staff in his hand and moved hither and thither among the knights with cheerful greeting for each, was Count Ernault of Toulouse, Duke Baldwin's right-hand man and lord-marshal of the lists. The two who walked and talked together in the shade, talking very surely of women and deeds of war, were Sir Ambrose of Blois and Sir Raymond of Provence. The two who sat and diced upon a drum-head, with faces as grave as if every cast gave or took great slices of empire, were Demetrius, the vassal prince of Epirus, and Andronicus Palæologus, the great noble from Constantinople.