The fellow’s lips quivered; he stirred a little, strove to lift his head, mumbled thickly like a man with a palsied tongue. Jaspar put his ear to the bruised mouth and listened. He won words out of the grave, for his rough face hardened, his brows were knotted over the dying man’s stumbling syllables. The harper shouted in his ear, and again waited. "Gam--Gambrevault, Flavian’s men, dead, all dead," ran the death utterance. "Ave Maria, my lips burn--St. Eulalie--St. Jude, defend me----" A cough snapped the halting appeal. The man stiffened suddenly in Jaspar’s arms, and thrust out his feet with a strong spasm. His hands clawed the grass; his jaw fell, leaving his mouth agape, a black circle of death. There was a last rattling stridor. Then the head fell back over Jaspar’s knee with the neck extended, the eyes wide with a visionless stare. A shadow fell athwart the dead man and the living, a shadow edged with the golden web of the fire. Looking up, Jaspar the harper saw the girl standing above him, staring down upon the dead man’s body. The red tower framed her figure with flame, making an ebon cloud of her hair, her body a pillar of sombre stone. Her face was grey, pinched, and expressionless. Youth seemed frozen for the moment into bleak and premature age. She bowed down suddenly, her hair falling forward like a cataract, her eyes large with a tearless hunger. Pointing to the man on Jaspar’s knee, she looked into the harper’s face, and spoke to him. "Quick, the truth. I fear it no longer." Her voice was toneless and hoarse as an untuned string. She beat her hands together, and then stood with her fists pressed over her heart. "Quick, the truth." The old man turned the body gently to the grass, and still knelt at the woman’s feet. "It is Jean," he said, with great quietness, "Jean the swineherd. He is dead. God rest his soul!" She bent forward again with arm extended, her voice deep and hoarse in her throat. "Tell me, who is it that has slain my father?" "They of Gambrevault." "Ah!" Her eyes gleamed behind her hair as it fell dishevelled over her face. "And the rest--Bertrand, my brothers?" Her voice appealed him with a gradual fear. Jaspar the harper bowed his face, and pointed to the tower. The girl straightened, and stood quivering like a loosened bow. "God! In there! And Roland?" Again the harper’s hand went up with the slow inevitableness of destiny. The flames, as beneath the incantations of a sibyl, leapt higher, roaring hungrily towards the heavens. The girl swayed away some paces, her lips moving silently, her hair fanned by the draught, blowing about her like a veil. She turned to the tower, thrust up her hands to it with a strong gesture of anguish and despair.