The wild was as some primæval waste, desolate and terrible, a vast flood of sombre green rolling over hill and valley. Its thickets plunged midnight into the bosom of day. On the hills, the trees stood like traceried pinnacles, spears blood-red in the sunset, or splashed with the glittering magic of the moon. There were dells sunk deep beneath crags; choked with dense darkness, unsifted by the sun. Winding alleys white with pebbles as with the bones of the dead, wound through seething seas of gorse. In summer, heather sucked with purple lips at the tapestries of moss blazoning the ground, bronze, green, and gold. It was a wild region, and mysterious, a shadowland moaned over by the voice of a distressful wind. Yeoland held southwards by the gilded vane of the sun. She had turned back her hood upon her shoulders, and fastened her black hair over her bosom with a brooch of amethysts. The girl was wise in woodlore and the philosophies of nature. The sounds and sights of the forest were like a gorgeous missal to her, blazoned with all manner of magic colours. She knew the moods of hawk and hound, had camped often under the steely stare of a winter sky, had watched the many phases of the dawn. Hers was a nature ripe for the hazardous intent of life. It was she who led, not Jaspar. The harper followed her with a martyred reason, having, for all his discontent, some faith in her keen eyes and the delicate decision of her chin. There was a steady dejection in the girl’s mood--a dejection starred, however, with red wrath like sparks glowing upon tinder. She was no Agnes, no Amorette, mere pillar of luscious beauty. Her eyes were as blue-black shields, flashing with many sheens in the face of day. The flaming tower, the dead figure in the forest grave, had thrust the gentler part out of her being. She was miserable, mute, yet full of a volcanic courage. As for the harper, a rheumy dissatisfaction pervaded his temper. His blood ran cold as a toad’s in winter weather. He blew upon his fingers, dreaming of inglenooks and hot posset, and the casual luxuries the forest did not promise. Yeoland considered not the old man’s babblings. Her heart looked towards the dawn, and knew nothing of the twilight under the dark eaves of age. They had pressed a mile or more into the waste, and the day was waxing sere and yellow in the west. Before them ran a huge thicket, its floor splashed with tawny splendours, the sable plumes touched with gold by the sun. Its deep bosom hung full of purple gloom, dusted with amber, wild and windless. A sudden "hist" from his lady’s lips made the harper start in the saddle. Her hand had snatched at his bridle. Both horses came to a halt. The man looked at her as they sat knee to knee; she was alert and vigilant, her eyes bright as the eyes of a hawk. "Marked you that?" she said to him in a whisper. Jaspar gave her a vacant stare and shook his head. "Nothing?" "Boughs swaying in the wind, no more."