The road bent. Rounding a craggy corner, Paladin and he well-nigh trod upon a sleeping man, propped at the road edge against a grey boulder. Paladin curvetted aside, Garin swore by his favourite saint, the man awoke and stretched his arms. He was young,—five or six years older, perhaps, than Garin. His dress, when it came to hue and cut, showed extravagant and gay, but the stuffs of which it was composed were far from costly. Here showed a rent, rather neatly darned, and here a soil rubbed away as thoroughly as might be. He was dark and thin, with long, narrow eyes that gave him an Eastern look. Beside him, slung from his neck by a ribbon, lay a lute, and he smiled with professional brilliancy. CHAPTER II THE JONGLEUR AND THE HERD-GIRL “JONGLEUR,” said Garin, “some miles from this spot there is a feast day in a fair town. This is the strangest thing that ever I saw, that a jongleur should be here and not there!” “Esquire,” said the other, “I have certain information that the prince holds to-day a great tourney, and that every knight and baron in forty miles around has gone to the joust. I know not an odder thing than that all the knights should be riding in one direction and all the esquires in another!” “Two odd things in one day is good measure,” said Garin. “That is a fine lute you have.” The thin dark person drew the musical instrument in front of him and began to play, and then to sing in a fair-to-middling voice. “In the spring all hidden close, Lives many a bud will be a rose. In the spring ’tis crescent morn, But then, ah then, the man is born! In the spring ’tis yea or nay; Then cometh Love makes gold of clay! Love is the rose and truest gold, Love is the day and soldan bold, Love—” The jongleur yawned and ceased to sing. “Why,” he asked the air, “why should I sing Guy of Perpignan’s doggerel and give it immortality when Guy of Perpignan, turning on his heel, hath turned me off?” He drew the ribbon over his head, laid the lute on the grass, and leaning back, closed his eyes. Garin gazed at the lute for a moment then, dismounting, picked it up and tried his hand. He sang a hunting stave, in a better voice by far than was the jongleur’s. None had ever told him that he had a nightingale in his throat. The jongleur opened his eyes. “Good squire, I could teach you to sing not so badly! But sing of love—sing of love! Hunting is, poetically speaking, out of court favour.” “I sing of that which I know of,” said Garin. The other sat up. “Have I found the phœnix? Nay, nay, I trow not! Love is the theme, and I have not found a man—no, not in cloister—who could not rhyme and carol and expound it! Love is extremely in fashion.—Have you a lord?” “Aye.” “Has not that lord a lady?” “Aye, so.” “Then love thy lady, and sing of it.” “I know,” said Garin, “that love is the fashion.” “The height of it,” answered the other. “It has been so now for fifty years and there seems no declining. It rages.”