Quickly, Mallory turned down the left-hand corridor and started along it, counting his footsteps. Rushes rustled beneath his feet, and the flickering light of wall-torches gave him a series of grotesque shadows. He saw no one: all the servants were in the banquet hall, pouring wine and mead. He laughed aloud. Forty-eight paces sufficed to see him to the chamber door. It was a perfectly ordinary door. Opening it, he thought at first that the room beyond was ordinary, too. Then he saw the burning candles arranged along the walls, and beneath them, standing in the center of the floor, the table of silver. The table of the Sangraal.... There was no Sangraal on the table, however. There was no Sangraal in the room, for that matter. There was a girl, though. She was huddled forlornly in a corner, and she was crying. II Mallory laid his spear aside, strode across the room, and raised the girl to her feet. "The Sangraal," he said, forgetting in his agitation the few odds and ends of Old English he had memorized. "Where is it!" She raised startled eyes that were as round, and almost as large, as plums. Her face was round, too, and faintly childlike. Her hair was dark-brown, and done up in a strange and indeterminate coiffeur that was as charming as it was disconcerting. Her ankle-length dress was white, and there was a bow on the bodice that matched the plum-blueness of her eyes. A few cosmetics, properly applied, would have turned her into an attractive woman, and even without them, she rated a second look. She stared at him for some time, then, "Surely ye be an advision, sir," she said. "I ... I know ye not." Mallory swung his shield around so that she could see the red cross. "Now do you know me?" She gasped, and her eyes grew even rounder. "Sir ... Sir Galahad! Oh, fair knight, wherefore did ye not say?" Mallory ignored the question. "The Sangraal," he repeated. "Where is it?" Her tears had ceased temporarily; now they began again. "Oh, fair sir!" she cried, "ye see tofore you, a damosel at mischief, the which was given guardianship of the Holy Vessel at her own request, and bewrayed her trust, a damosel--" "Never mind all that," Mallory said. "Where's the Sangraal?" "I wot not, fair sir." "But you must know if you were guarding it!" "I wot not whither it was taken." "But you must wot who took it." "Wot I well, fair knight. Sir Launcelot, the which is thy father, bare it from the chamber." Mallory was stunned. "But that's impossible! My fa--Sir Launcelot wouldn't steal the Sangraal!" "Well I wot, fair sir; yet steal it he did. Came he unto the chamber and saith, I hight Sir Launcelot du Lake of the Table Round, whereat I did see his armor to be none other; so then took he the Vessel covered with the red samite and bare it with him from the chamber, whereat I--" "How long ago?"