“But the lady’s misery over-balanced my reputation, so that after her I went, and with six hours’ hard riding, through so wild places, as it was rather the cunning of my horse sometimes than of myself, so rightly to hit the way, I overgat them a little before night, near to an old ill-favoured castle, the place where I perceived they meant to perform their unknightly errand. For there they began to strip her of her clothes, when I came in among them, and running through the first with a lance, the justness of the cause so enabled me against the rest, false-hearted in their own wrong doing, that I had in as short time almost as I had been fighting with only Anaxius, delivered her from those injurious wretches, most of whom carried news to the other world, that amongst men secret wrongs are not always left unpunished. As for Pamphilus, he having once seen, and as it should seem, remembered me, even from the beginning began to be in the rearward, and before they had left fighting, he was too far off to give them thanks for their pains. But when I had delivered to the lady a full liberty, both in effect and in opinion, for some time it was before she could assure herself she was out of their hands, who had laid so vehement apprehensions of death upon her, she then told me, how as she was returning towards her father’s, weakly accompanied, as too soon trusting to the falsehood of reconcilement, Pamphilus had set upon her and, killing those that were with her, carried herself by such force, and with such manner as I had seen, to this place, where he meant in cruel and shameful manner to kill her, in the sight of her own father, to whom he had already sent word of it, that out of his castle window, for this castle, she said, was his, he might have the prospect of his only child’s destruction in my coming, whom, she said, he feared as soon as he knew me by the armour, had not warranted her from that near approaching cruelty. I was glad I had done so good a deed for a {224} gentlewoman not unhandsome, whom before I had in like sort helped. But the night beginning to persuade some retiring place, the gentlewoman, even out of countenance before she began her speech, much after this manner invited me to lodge that night with her father.