Fair Helissend, the daughter of the murdered Milo of Cologne, is her captive at once and her favourite, and when the French host takes up its position before the Rune, names and points out young Baldwin to her.

   With her husband’s sanction, Sebile has her tent pitched on the bank, and establishes herself there with her ladies to act as decoys to the Franks; for “fair lady’s look makes men undertake folly.” She is taken, however, in her own toils; falls in love with Baldwin one summer’s day on seeing him ride forth with hawk on wrist, and makes Helissend invite him over the river, under a very frank pledge that “she will be his, for loss or gain.” Their first meeting apparently takes place in the presence of Sebile’s ladies, and so little mystery is attached to their love that, on Baldwin’s return to the Frank host after killing and despoiling of his armour a Saxon chief, he not only tells his adventure publicly to the Emperor, but the latter promises in a twelvemonth to have him crowned king of the country and to give him Sebile for wife, forbidding him, however, to cross the river any more—a command which Baldwin hears without meaning to obey. Nay, when Baldwin has once broken this injunction and escaped with great difficulty from the Saxons, the Emperor imposes on him the brutal penance of entering Sebile’s tent to kiss her in the sight of the Saxons, and bringing back her ring—which Baldwin contrives to fulfil by putting on the armour of a Saxon knight whom he kills. As in The Taking of Orange, it never seems to occur to the poet that there can be any moral wrong in making love to a “Saracen’s” wife, or in promising her hand in her husband’s lifetime; and, strange to say, so benignant are these much-wronged paynim that Guiteclin is not represented as offering or threatening the slightest ill-treatment to his faithless queen, however wroth he may be against her lover; nor, indeed, as having even the sense to make her pitch her tent further from the bank. The drollest bit of sentimentality occurs, however, after the victory of the Franks and Guiteclin’s death, when Sebile is taken prisoner. After having been bestowed in marriage on Baldwin by the Emperor, she asks one boon of both, which is that Guiteclin’s body be sought for, lest the beasts should eat it—a request the exceeding nobleness of which strikes the Emperor and the Frank knights with astonishment. When the body is found and brought to Sebile, “the water of her eyes falls down her chin. ‘Ha, Guiteclin,’ said she, ‘so gentle a man were you, liberal and free-spending, and of noble witness! If in heaven and on earth Mahomet has no power, even to pray Him who made Lazarus, I pray and request Him to have mercy on thee.’” The dead man is then 

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