Yeoland enlightened him. "Tush. There’s no wind moving. A glimmer of armour, yonder, up the slope." "Holy Jude!" "A flash, it has gone." They held silent under the drooping boughs, listening, with noiseless breath. The breeze made mysterious murmurings with a vague unrest; now and again a twig cracked, or some forest sound floated down like a filmy moth on the quiet air. The trees were dumb and saturnine, as though resenting suspicion of their sable aisles. Jaspar, peering over his shoulder, jerked out a word of warning. Yeoland, catching the monosyllable from his lips, and following his stare, glanced back into the eternal shadows of the place. "I see nothing," she said. Jaspar answered her slowly, his eyes still at gaze. "A shadow slipping from trunk to trunk." "Where?" "I see it no longer. The saints succour us!" Yeoland’s face was dead white under her hair; her mouth gaped like a circle of jet. She listened constantly. Her head moved in stately fashion on her slim neck, as she shot glances hither and thither into the glooms, her eyes challenging the world. She felt peril, but was no craven in the matter--a contrast to Jaspar, who shook as with an ague. The harper’s distress broke forth into petulant declaiming. "Trapped," he said; "I could have guessed as much, with all this fooling. These skulkers are like crows round carrion. Shall we lose much, madame?" "Gold, Jaspar, if they are content with such. What if they should be of Gambrevault!" The harper gave a quivering whistle, a shrill breath between his teeth, eloquent of the unpleasant savour of such a chance. It was beyond him for the moment whether he preferred being held up by a footpad, to being bullied by some ruffian of a feudatory. He had a mere bodkin of a dagger in his belt, and little lust for the letting of blood. "’Tis a chance, madame," he said, with a certain lame sententiousness, "that had not challenged my attention. Say nothing of Cambremont; one word would send us to the devil." "Am I a fool? Since these gentlemen will not declare themselves, let us hold on and tempt their purpose." Thinking to see the swirl of shadows under the trees, the glimmer of steel in the forest’s murk, they rode on at a lifeless trot. Nothing echoed to their thoughts. The woods stood impassive, steeped in solitude. There was a strange atmosphere of peace about the place that failed to harmonise their fears. Yet like a prophecy of wind there stole in persistently above the muffled tramp of hoofs, a dull, characterless sound, touched with the crackling of rotten wood, that seemed to hint at movement in the shadows.