Pushing on at his best pace, soon he was wandering about among the trees as near to that spot where he had seen the birds fall as he could guess it, calling to the falcon and searching for her with his eyes. But here, in the dense grove, the fading light grew faint, so that at length he was obliged to abandon the quest in despair, and turned to find his way to the Leyden road. When within twenty paces of it, suddenly he came upon hawk and heron. The heron was stone dead, and the brave falcon so injured that it seemed hopeless to try to save her, for as he feared, they had crashed through the boughs of a tree in their fall. Adrian looked at her in dismay, for he loved this bird, which was the best of its kind in the city, having trained her himself from a nestling. Indeed there had always been a curious sympathy between himself and this fierce creature of which he made a companion as another man might of a dog. Even now he noted with a sort of pride that broken-winged and shattered though she was, her talons remained fixed in the back of the quarry, and her beak through the neck. He stroked the falcon’s head, whereon the bird, recognising him, loosed her grip of the heron and tried to flutter to her accustomed perch upon his wrist, only to fall to the ground, where she lay watching him with her bright eyes. Then, because there was no help for it, although he choked with grief at the deed, Adrian struck her on the head with his staff until she died. “Goodbye, friend,” he muttered; “at least that is the best way to go hence, dying with a dead foe beneath,” and, picking up the peregrine, he smoothed her ruffled feathers and placed her tenderly in his satchel. Then it was, just as Adrian rose to his feet, standing beneath the shadow of the big oak upon which the birds had fallen, that coming from the road, which was separated from him by a little belt of undergrowth, he heard the sound of men’s voices growling and threatening, and with them a woman’s cry for help. At any other time he would have hesitated and reconnoitred, or, perhaps, have retreated at once, for he knew well the dangers of mixing himself up in the quarrels of wayfarers in those rough days. But the loss of the hawk had exasperated his nerves, making any excitement or adventure welcome to him. Therefore, without pausing to think, Adrian pushed forward through the brushwood to find himself in the midst of a curious scene.