Martin stood like a statue, and Rich bellowed again: “Have done with this fooling. Will you give us the place, or are we to take it?” Martin was waiting for something, and that something came. He saw Mellis raise her head proudly; he saw her mouth open; her voice reached out to him across the water: “Stand fast, Martin Valliant!” He raised the cross of his sword and kissed it as a sign to her. “To the death!” he called to her. And John Rich, accepting the defiance, turned his horse and rode back with Mellis to the beech wood. Now John Rich was a man of method. He posted a guard of ten men to cover the bridge, and two more to patrol the banks of the mere. The rest disappeared into the woods, shed their harness, and took to ax and saw, for John Rich had brought a tumbril laden with ropes, a ladder, tools, balks of timber, and such-like gear from Troy Castle. The matter was to be undertaken stolidly and with thoroughness. He set his men at building a couple of rafts or floats that could be dragged down to the mere after dark. Half his party would pole themselves over to attack the house, while the rest held the causeway. Martin kept watch upon the tower, and Swartz remained with him out of a new-born spirit of comradeship. A great restlessness tormented Martin Valliant. He could no longer see his love, nor guess what might have befallen her, and his soul suffered in a lover’s purgatory. All the past years had been blotted out; he had lived just seven days since this woman had come into his life, with those eyes of hers dark as the forest and her lips red as the rose. Great storms of tenderness and wrath swept through him. He was tortured by vivid memories of her, flashes of her that hurt his soul, the miraculous way her dark eyes would fill with golden lights, her plaintive look when she was sad, the little dimple in her cheek, the way her lips moved, the shape of her fingers, the curve of her chin, the falling of her dark hair over her ears. These vivid flashes of her intoxicated, maddened him. He wanted to pour himself out, die for her, spend his great love, and make her feel it. Swartz watched Martin closely as he went restlessly to and fro, or stood and stared at the beech wood as though it held both heaven and hell. “Patience, brother.” Martin turned on him with furious eyes. “Patience! Man, man, I burn—I burn!” “Keep your torch alight; there is no harm in it. With the night will come your hope.” “Night?” “Things may be done by a desperate man at night.” “True. I can swim the moat.” He stood and brooded with a face that spelled death for some one. His love and his helplessness scorched him like flame. He could have choked Swartz for telling him to wait, though in his heart he knew that Swartz was right. Sometimes he would start, fancying that he had heard Mellis calling to him: “Martin—Martin Valliant!” He would turn on Swartz: “Did you hear?” “Nothing, my son—nothing.”