Gilbert drew himself up a little as if not pleased by the jest. "You know well that I have no rank, Madam," he said; "and though it should please you to command of me some worthy deed, and I should, by the grace of God, deserve knighthood, yet I would not have it save of my lawful sovereign." "Such as teaching me to play tennis?" she asked, seeming not to hear the end of his speech. "You should as well be knighted for that as for any other thing hard to do." "Your Grace is never in earnest." "Sometimes I am." Her eyelids drooped a little as she looked at him. "Not often enough, you think? And you--too often. Always, indeed." "If I were Queen of France, I could be light-hearted, too," said Gilbert. "But if your Grace were Gilbert Warde, you should be perhaps a sadder man than I." And he also laughed a little, but bitterly. Eleanor raised her smooth brows and spoke with a touch of irony. "Are you so young, and have you already such desperate sorrows?" But as she looked, his face changed, with that look of real and cruel suffering which none can counterfeit. He leaned back against the penthouse, looking straight before him. Then she, seeing that she had touched the nerve in an unhealed wound, glanced sidelong at him, bit upon her sprig of rosemary again, turned, and with half-bent head walked slowly along to the next buttress; she turned again there, and coming back stood close before him, laying one hand upon his folded arm and looking up to his eyes, that gazed persistently over her head. "I would not hurt you for the world," she said very gravely. "I mean to be your friend, your best friend--do you understand?" Gilbert looked down and saw her upturned face. It should have moved him even then, he thought, and perhaps he did not himself know that between her and him there was the freezing shadow of a faint likeness to his mother. "You are kind, Madam," he said, somewhat formally. "A poor squire without home or fortune can hardly be the friend of the Queen of France." She drew back from him half a step, but her outstretched hand still rested on his arm. "What have lands and fortune to do with friendship--or with love?" she asked. "Friendship's home is in the hearts of men and women; friendship's fortune is friendship's faith." "Ay, Madam, so it should be," answered Gilbert, his voice warming in a fuller tone. "Then be my friend," she said, and her hand turned itself palm upward, asking for his. He took it and raised it to his lips in the act of bending one knee. But she hindered him; her fingers closed on his with a strength greater than he had supposed that any woman could possess, and she held him and made him stand upright again, so that he would have had to use force to kneel before her. "Leave that for the court," she said; "when we are alone let us enjoy our freedom and be simply human beings, man and woman, friend and friend."