Some twoscore thousand men had marched with Fulviac into the forest’s sanctuary. Over the hills the royal horse had pressed them hard, cutting down stragglers, hanging on their rear. Fulviac’s host was a horde of "foot"; he had not a thousand riders to hurl against the chivalry of the King. On the bold, bleak uplands of the north and west the royal horsemen would have whelmed him like a sea. Necessity turned strategist at that hour. Fulviac and his rebels poured with their stagnant columns into the wilds. The thickets teemed with steel; the myriad pike points glittered like silver moths through the dense green gloom. Once more the great cliff echoed to the clangour of war and the sword. Fulviac had drawn thither and camped his men upon the heights, and under the shadow of its mighty walls. Watch-fires smoked on the hills. Every alley had its sentinel, a net of steel thrown forth to await the coming of the King. Fulviac had gathered his cubs into this lair, trusting to trammel the nobles in the labyrinths of the forest. It was a forlorn hope, the cunning purpose of despair. The spoilers of Belle Forêt were wise in their generation; little mercy would they win from the Iron Hand of Richard of Lauretia. Like a pale pearl set in ebony, Yeoland the Saint had been established again in her bower of stone. The room was even as she had left it that misty summer dawn. Prayer-desk, lute, and crucifix were there, mute relics of a passionate past. How much had befallen her in those packed weeks of peril; how great a guerdon of woe had been lavished on her heart! Love was as the last streak of gold in a fading west; only the stars recalled the unwavering lamps of heaven. The cliff-room and its relics tortured her very soul. She would glance at the Sebastian of the casement, and remember with a shuddering rush of woe the man in whose arms she had slumbered as a wife. Death had deified him in her heart. She remembered his grey eyes, his splendid youth, his passion, his pure chivalry. He gazed down on her like a dream hero from a gloom of dusky gold. The bitter ecstasy of the past spoke to her only of the infinite beneficence of death. The grave yearned for her, and she had no hope to live. Those drear days she saw little of Fulviac. The man seemed to shirk her pale, sad face and brooding eyes. Her grief stung him more fiercely than all the flames nurtured in the glowing pit of war. Moreover, he was cumbered with the imminent peril of his cause, and the facing of a stormy fortune. His one hope lay in some great battle in the woods, where the King’s mailed chivalry would be cumbered by the trees. He made many a feint to tempt the nobles to this wild tussle. The cliff stood as adamant, a vast bulwark to uphold the rebels. Yet Nature threatened him with other arguments. His stores were meagre, his mouths many. Victory and starvation dangled upon the opposing beams of Fate.