It was at St. Gore, a red-roofed town packed on a hill, amid tall, dreaming woods, that Colgran, with the ten thousand who had leaguered Gambrevault, drew to the main host again. Fulviac had quartered a portion of his troops in the town, and had camped the rest in the meadows without the crumbling, lichen-grown walls. He had halted but for a night on the retreat from Lauretia, and had taken a brief breath in the moil and sweat of the march. His banner had been set up in the market-square before a rickety hostel of antique tone and temper. His guards lounged on the benches under the vines; his captains drank in the low-ceilinged rooms, swore and argued over the rough tables. It was evening when Colgran’s vanguard entered the town by the western gate. His men had tramped all day in the sun, and were parched and weary. None the less, they stiffened their loins, and footed it through the streets with a veteran swagger to show their mettle. Fulviac came out and stood in the wooden gallery of the inn, watching them defile into the market-square. They tossed their pikes to him as they poured by, and called on him by name-- "Fulviac, Fulviac!" He was glad enough of their coming, for he needed men, and the rough forest levies were in Colgran’s ranks. Ten thousand pikes and brown bills to bristle up against the King’s squadrons! There was strength in the glitter and the rolling dust of the columns. Yet before all, the man’s tawny eyes watched for a red banner, and a woman in armour upon a white horse, Yeoland, wife of Flavian of Gambrevault. In due season he saw her, a pale, spiritless woman, wan and haggard, thin of neck and dark of eye. The bloom seemed to have fallen from her as from the crushed petals of a rose. The red banner, borne by a man upon a black horse, danced listlessly upon its staff. She rode with slack bridle, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, but into the vague distance as into the night of the past. Around her tramped Colgran’s pikemen in jerkins of leather and caps of steel. The woman moved with them as though they were so many substanceless ghosts, stalking like shadows down the highway of death. Her face was bloodless, bleached by grievous apathy and chill pride. The bronzed faces round her were dim and unreal, a mob of masks, void of life and meaning. Sorrow had robed her in silent snow. The present was no more propitious to her than a winter forest howling under the moon.