But further behind curved a line of color that flamed and burned: six bright horses, almost blue in the gloaming, were led by pages at a run, with cloths of red velvet on their bending necks. Red was the wagon which they drew, and within it gold shone heavy on the tender bosoms and slender arms of the seneschal’s daughters. Six damsels rode after it with hair blonde as grain, their pointed feet playing beneath the hem of their kirtles; six huntsmen blew calls which seemed to dance and swing like wheels from the mouths of the crooked horns. The contours of the plain danced with them and shot past one another in wine-colored mist, while the clouds above had glittering borders like the wings of butterflies. The party formed into a semi-circle, plume by plume, shoulder by shoulder, around a bush where the captive was tied. The horsecloths flapped in the wind; the red taking on depth in the shadow, heavy as hopeless yearning; the red burning in the light, gay as the clamor of victory. The maidens’ delicate necks leaned forward out of the wagon, and their conical hoods flowed into one with the descending line of their shoulders. They were like herons, thought Renaud, and he almost expected to hear them add a shrill shriek, when the notes of the horns fell far away like hurled stones, and all became silent. But when he saw them more plainly with their thin, straight lips and strange, dreaming eyes, which were always leveled in a chill ecstasy on something infinitely distant, and their white, indolent hands in their laps, and the long folds of their garments--they seemed to him wondrously beautiful, like the most gorgeous saints’ pictures with a dimming glow of wax tapers at their feet, and it pained him that they should see him bound. He let his gaze leap further, past the damsels--shy, jaunty birds that he wanted to frighten with a whistle--past the red faces and inquisitively gaping mouths of the grooms, past the brown plain, where he had run himself tired and dreamed himself tired. He knew what doom awaited him, but when the Iceland falcon was borne forward and he realized it was this which was to exact the penalty, he laughed in his joy, and his heart throbbed with pride, as when he possessed the bird and the long sunny days and the plain with the listening winds and the swaying trees of autumn yellow.