Red Head scrambled up and dusted his clothes. Fulk de Lisle was too soaring a bird for him to fly at, but his impudence refused to be chastened. “I trust your news is better than your face, sir. Our dear lord has the ague this morning.” Fulk de Lisle rode on, without troubling to turn the lad’s wit. He clattered over the bridge and into the main court, and the men who saw him ride in stared at his savage face. “Pride has had a fall,” said some one. “Or been balked of a woman.” Fulk de Lisle called a page who was loitering on the steps of the chapel. “Have you nothing but eyes, you brat? Where is my lord?” “In his closet, sir.” “Run and tell him that I am in the castle.” Roger Bland already had the news, and his groom of the chamber came out with a haggard face. “My lord would see you—instantly.” “Damnation—may not a man eat?” The Lord of Troy sat in his great padded chair with a writing-board on his knees, and quills and an inkhorn on the table at his side. He looked white about the gills, with that whiteness that tells of a faltering heart; his hand had lost its steady, clerkly niceness, and there were blots upon the paper. He had not been barbered, and still wore a gorgeous crimson bed-gown that made his thin face look all the yellower. “What’s this—what’s this, man? Shut that door, Bennington. Not more bad news?” He was petulant to the point of childishness. Fulk de Lisle’s red-brown eyes looked at him with veiled and subtle scorn. “I could not make it worse, my lord. The Forest is up.” “The Forest—in arms against us! Man—you are dreaming!” “I am very wide awake, sir. We were ambushed last night as we lay outside Woodmere. They must have been a hundred to our thirty. We made a fight of it; that is all that can be said.” Roger Bland’s face twitched. “How many men came back with you?” “None, my lord.” There was a short silence. My Lord of Troy’s fingers were playing with his quill. He looked old and querulous. “These swine! I thought we had tamed them. There is a deeper cunning in all this. I have had secret news this very morning. Richmond is on the sea. By now he may have landed.” Fulk de Lisle took the news as a soldier of fortune takes his pay. “The King will not grudge him a battle, my lord.” “Bombast is so easy. But to say who are friends and who are enemies! Supposing I chose to have you hanged, sir?” “A most unreasonable fancy, my lord.” “And why?” “I have risked my neck in your service. I have no quarrel with your generosity. And my pride is concerned in this—the pride of a soldier and a captain.”