"What is more, this vagabond of Avalon has been begging twelve hours’ grace to scrape his soul clean for Peter." "Ah!" she said, with a sudden stark earnestness. "I will give him till sunset----" "If I suffer it----" "The dog has spirit. I would thrust no man into the dark till he has struck a bargain with his own particular saints." She drew back, sank down into a chair with her hair half hiding her face. "You are right in being merciful," she said very slowly. Magic riddle of life; rare roseate rod of love. Was it youth leaping towards youth, the cry of the lark to the dawn, the crimson flowering of a woman’s pity? The air seemed woven through with gold. A thousand lutes had sounded in the woods. Voiceless, she sat with flickering lids, amazed at the alchemy that had wrought ruth out of hate. Fulviac had drawn back into the gloom of the gallery. He turned suddenly upon his heel, and his scabbard smote and rang against the rock. "I take all the men I have," he said to her, "even the dotard Jaspar, for he knows the ways. Gregory and Adrian I leave on guard; they are tough gentlemen, and loyal. As for the lordling, he is well shackled." Yeoland was still cowering in her chair with the mysterious passions of the moment. "You will return?" she asked him. "By nightfall, if we prosper; as we shall." He moved two paces, stayed again in his stride, and flung a last message to her from the black throat of the passage. "Remember, there is no recantation over this business. The man is my affair as well as yours. He is a power in the south, and would menace us. Remember, he must die." He turned and left her without more palaver. She heard him go clanging down the gallery, heard the thunder of a heavy door, the braying of a horn. A long while she sat motionless, still as stone, her hands lying idle in her lap. When an hour had passed, the sun smote in, and found her kneeling at her prayer-desk, her breviary dewed with tears. XII Fulviac passed away that morning into the forest, a shaft of red amid the mournful glooms. Colour and steel streamed after him fantastically. The great cliff, silent and desolate, basked like a leviathan in the sun. Of the daylight and its crown of gold, the girl Yeoland had no deep joy. When she had ended her passion over the blazoned pages of her breviary, and mopped her tears with a corner of her gown, she rose to realism, and turned her mood to the cheating of the dues of time.