Lords, knights, and squires, the chivalry of Roche-de-Frêne, was hers. They liked a woman to be lion-hearted, and they forgot the old name that had been given her. Perhaps it was no longer applicable, perhaps it had never, in any high degree, been applicable. Perhaps there had been some question of fashion, and a beauty not answered to by the eyes of many beholders, a thing of spirit, mind, and rarity. Her vassals, great and less great, gave her devout service; they trusted her, warp and woof. She had a genius and a fire that she breathed into them and that aided to heroic deeds. Garin of the Golden Island did high things in the siege of Roche-de-Frêne. Where almost all were brave, where each day deeds resounded, he grew to have a name here for exquisiteness of daring as he had had it in the land beyond the sea.... He found himself, in one of those periods of stillness between assaults, alone by the watch-tower above the castle garden. He had left Aimar at the barbican, Rainier he had sent upon some errand. It was nearing sunset, and the trees in the garden had an autumn tint. The year wheeled downward. Garin, mounting the watch-tower, found upon the summit a mantled figure, leaning against the battlement overlooking the wide prospect. A moment, and he saw that it was the princess and would have withdrawn. But Audiart called him back. In the garden below waited a page and an attendant of whom the princess was fond—the dark-eyed girl who told stories well. But for the rest there held a solitude. She had come from the White Tower to taste this quiet and to look afar, to bathe her senses in this stillness after clamour, and to feel overhead the enemyless expanse. “You are welcome, Sir Garin of the Golden Island!” she said, and turned toward him. “I watched you lead the sally yesterday. No brave poet ever made men more one with him than you did then—” Garin came to her side, bent and kissed her mantle edge where her arm brought it against the battlement. “Princess of Roche-de-Frêne!” he said, “watching you, in this war, all men turn brave and poets.” He had spoken as he felt. But, “No!” said the Princess Audiart. “No man turns what he is not.” She looked again at the wide prospect. “My heart aches,” she said, “because of all the misery! At times I would that I knew—” She rested her brow upon her hands. The sun touched the mountains, jagged and sharp, shaped long ago by central fires. The castle and town of Roche-de-Frêne were bathed in a golden light. The princess uncovered her eyes. “Well! we travel as we may, or as the inner will doth will.—How long do you think that this castle will go untaken by Montmaure?” “I think that it will go forever untaken by Montmaure.” “He is strong—he has old strength.... But I came to the garden and the watch-tower not to think of that and of how the battle goes.... Look at the violet stealing up from the plain.” “In the morning comes the sun once more! I believe in light.”