He appeared to fathom the spirit of the girl’s scrutiny, nor did he take umbrage at the open and critical revision of her glances. He inferred calmly enough, that she considered him by no means blemishless in feature or in atmosphere. Probably he had long passed that age when the sanguine bachelor never doubts of plucking absolute favour from the eyes of a woman. The girl was not wholly enamoured of him. He was rational enough to read that in her glances. "Madame is in doubt," he said to her, with a glimmer of a smile. "As to what, messire?" "My character." "You prefer the truth?" "Am I not a philosopher?" "Hear the truth then, messire, I would not have you for a master." The man laughed, a quiet, soundless laugh through half-closed lips. There was something magnetic about his grizzled and ironical strength, cased in its shell of blackened steel. He had the air of one who had learnt to toy with his fellows, as with so many strutting puppets. The world was largely a stage to him, grotesque at some seasons, strenuous at others. "Ha, a miracle indeed," he said, "a woman who can tell the truth." She ignored the gibe and ran on. "Your name, messire?" The man spread his hands. "Pardon the omission. I am known as Fulviac of the Forest. My heritage I judge to be the sword, and the shadows of these same wilds." Yeoland considered him awhile in silence. The firelight flickered on his harness, glittering on the ribbed and jointed shoulder plates, striking a golden streak from the edge of each huge pauldron. Mimic flames burnt red upon his black cuirass, as in a darkened mirror. The night framed his figure in an aureole of gloom, as he sat with his massive head motionless upon its rock-like throat. "Five years ago," she said suddenly, "you rode as a noble in the King’s train. Now you declare yourself a thief. These things do not harmonise unless you confess to a dual self." "Madame," he answered her, "I confess to nothing. If you would be wise, eschew the past, and consider the present at your service. I am named Fulviac, and I am an outlaw. Let that grant you satisfaction." Yeoland glanced over the glade, walled in with the gloom of the woods, the stream foaming in the dusk, the armed men gathered about the further fire. "And these?" she asked. "Are mine." "Outcasts also?" "Say no hard things of them; they are folk whom the world has treated scurvily; therefore they are at feud with the world. The times are out of joint, tyrannous and heavy to bear. The nobles like millstones grind the poor into pulp, tread out the life from them, that the wine of pleasure may flow into gilded chalices. The world is trampled under foot. Pride and greed go hand in hand against us." She looked at him under her long lashes, with the zest of cavil slumbering in her eyes. Autocracy was a hereditary right with her, even though feudalism had slain her sire. "I would have the mob held in check," she said to him.