Inglesant looked after him anxiously, a heavy foreboding filling his mind. He saw his brother mount the little hill before the forge, between the bare branches of the trees on either side of the road; then a slight turn of the way concealed him, but, for a moment or two more, he could see glimpses of the figures as the leafless boughs permitted, then, when he could see even these no longer, he went back into the forge. It was some ten minutes before the horse was ready, and then Inglesant himself mounted, and rode off quickly after his brother. He had felt all the day, and during the one preceding it, a weariness and dulness of sense, the result, no doubt, of fatigue acting upon his only partially recovered health, and on a frame shattered by what he had gone through. As he rode on, his brain became more and more confused, so that for some moments together he was almost unconscious, and only by an effort regained his sense of passing events. The woods seemed to pass by him as in a dream, the thick winter air to hang about him like the heavy drapery of a pall; whether he was sleeping or waking he could scarcely tell. What added to his distress was an abiding sense of crisis and danger to his brother, which required him at that moment, above all others, to exert a strength and a prescience of which he felt himself becoming more and more incapable. He was continually making violent efforts to retain his recollection of what was passing, and of what it behoved him to do,—efforts which each time became more and more painful, and of the futility of which he became more and more despairingly conscious. Words cannot describe the torture of such a condition as this.