At last Simon found his profitable lair and lay hunched up in the darkness with his chin propped on his fists, watching the boy and girl. He interpreted their gestures with a raging heart, hearing now and then something of the words they spoke, for the night was very still. His torpid sense of honor was untroubled by this playing of the spy, for he felt now a very personal sense of enmity to the stranger knight who, as he was inclined to phrase it, had taken his wood-girl away from him. It was Simon's simple creed that if he cast his eyes upon a girl in favor, that girl was his by right; wherefore he watched the mutual wooing with hot eyes of wrath, and there were wild moments when he longed to leap out upon the pair, slay the man, and seize the girl--and perhaps he would have done so had he not been mortally afraid of the maid. But when he saw the youth reclining upon the grass and Argathona bending so tenderly over him, pity began to pull at his heartstrings sorely against his will--pity for the maid, naturally, not pity for the man. When the dryad, after breathing sleep on the face of her lover, disappeared into the forest Simon groped cautiously from his cover and moved stealthily over the moonlit space to the side of the sleeping man. He looked down upon the young, still face of Rainouart, rubbing his russet chin thoughtfully as he shrugged his shoulders in astonishment. "What does she see," he asked himself, "in that smooth, unmeaning face that she prefers him to me--to me who know what love means, and war, and how to love women, and carry my liquor, and who never wasted time over a silly, painted book?" That same painted book was still in the pouch of the young man's girdle, where he had thrust it when he had come from his reverie. There was a corner sticking out and it caught Simon's eye. He stooped and pulled the book from its concealment, a little square of vellum pages, scribed in a fine, clerkly hand, craftily enriched with pictures, and he balanced it curiously on his palm. "What was there," he asked himself, "in such a lump of ink-stained, pigmented parchment to make a man forget that he was alive?" Then, after a moment's hesitation, he slipped the volume into his own pouch as a lawful prize, resolving at some future time to see what he could make of its pages. The glimpse of the little, painted book fiercely rekindled his old resentment, which had withered a little at the sight of his enemy lying helpless on the grass. His fingers slipped to the horn handle of the knife that nestled in his girdle, and he moved it up and down from its sheath, enjoying grimly the slipperiness of the steel in the leather. Presently he plucked the blade bare and contemplated its brightness. "It is but jamming this to the hilt," he thought, "in that quiet, white flesh, and the Duchy of Athens were sadly lacking an heir, and my white witch were sadly in want of a lover."