that her cheeks had blanched to a lily white. Du Guesclin eyed her keenly from time to time, and passed his broad brown fingers through his crisp, curly black hair with the air of a man who is perplexed in his mind.
'These folk here,' said the knight of Bohemia, 'they do not seem too well fed.'
'Ah, canaille!' cried the Lord of Villefranche. 'You would scarce credit it, and yet it is sooth that when I was taken at Poictiers it was all that my wife and my foster-brother could do to raise the money from them for my ransom. The sulky dogs would rather have three twists of a rack, or the thumbikins for an hour, than pay out a denier for their own feudal father and liege lord. Yet there is not one of them but hath an old stocking full of gold pieces hid away in a snug corner.'
'Why do they not buy food then?' asked Sir Nigel. 'By Saint Paul! it seemed to me that their bones were breaking through their skin.'
'It is their grutching and grumbling which makes them thin. We have a saying here, Sir Nigel, that if you pummel Jacques Bonhomme he will pat you, but if you pat him he will pummel you. Doubtless you find it so in England.'
'Ma foi, no!' said Sir Nigel. 'I have two Englishmen of this class in my train, who are at this instant, I make little doubt, as full of your wine as any cask in your cellar. He who pummelled them might come by such a pat as he would be likely to remember.'
'I cannot understand it,' quoth the Seneschal, 'for the English knights and nobles whom I have met were not men to brook the insolence of the baseborn.'
'Perchance, my fair lord, the poor folk are sweeter and of a better countenance in England,' laughed the Lady Rochefort. 'Mon Dieu! you cannot conceive to yourself how ugly they are! Without hair, without teeth, all twisted and bent; for me, I cannot think how the good God ever came to make such people. I cannot bear it, I, and so my
