The prince did not tilt, but the duke had granted that during the day he would splinter one lance. His pavilion was therefore pitched, his shield hung before it, and two esquires walked up and down with a great black stallion. Now, with Stephen the Marshal and with his own knights, he left the gallery of honour and went to arm himself. Edging the lists ran a pathway, wide enough for two horsemen abreast. A railing divided it from the throng. As the duke and his party passed along this road, the crowd, suddenly learning or conjecturing that here was the lord in whose honour was planned the tournament, craned, many-headed, that way. It was very important to know if this lord were going to wed the princess! There were townsmen who had caught the word and called her the ugly princess. As yet they did not know much about her, though they saw her ride through the streets with her father, and that she looked at the people not with haughtiness but attentively. Of Alazais they were proud. Merchants of Roche-de-Frêne, when they travelled far away and there insinuated the praises of home, bragged of the beauty of their lord’s wife. Her name was known in Eastern bazaars.—But if there was to be a marriage it was important, and important to know the looks of the bridegroom. Some crowding took place, some pressing against the wooden barrier. At one point a plane tree, old and gnarled, stretched a bough above the pathway. It made a superb tower of observation and as such had been seized upon. The duke, walking with the marshal, and approaching this tree, became aware of folk aloft, thick as fruit upon the bough, half-hidden by the bronzing leaves, and more vocal than elsewhere. Certain judgements floated down. Holiday and festival encouraged licence of speech. The time enforced a reality of obedience from rank to rank, but that provided for, cared not to prevent mere wagging of tongues. The ruling castes never thought it out, but had they done so they might have said that it was not amiss that the people should somewhere indemnify themselves. Let them laugh, exercise their wit, so that it grew not too caustic—be merry-hearted, bold, and familiar! Who held the land held them, but it was pleasanter for the lord himself when the land knew jollity. Add that the courts of the south were more democratic than those of the north, and that Gaucelm was a democratic prince. The duke was of another temper,—a martinet and a stickler for respect on the part of the vulgar. He caught the comment and flushed. “An unmannerly people!” he said to Stephen the Marshal. That baron darted an experienced glance. “They are the younger, mechanical sort. Take no heed of them, fair lord.”