"Where is the braggart we talked with but now?" she asked, sharply, and her question proved hard to answer. The men-at-arms into whose charge Simon had been put looked at one another with dismay, for truly Simon had disappeared. The disappearance, very surprising to the soldiery, was not very surprising in itself. The fact of the matter was that Simon had decided some time back that it would be excellent well for him to be quite clear of the complication that the coming of the duchess had created. It was plain to the adventurer that the duchess had taken a fancy for the heir of Athens. It was also patent to his understanding that he himself existed an undesirable witness of that earlier passage between Rainouart and the woman of the wood, the story of which the duchess had so vehemently resented. Simon, who had something of the art of reading women's natures in their faces, imagined, not unwisely, that the Duchess of Thebes was not a woman to stick at much if the removal of a disagreeable witness might be convenient to her. Once Simon had made up his mind that it were well for him to go, he lost no time in making the experiment. It was no very difficult enterprise. The men in whose custody he stood, occupied to their greater interest in watching the duchess's attentions to the wounded knight, though they could see little and hear less, paid scant heed to Simon, who, on his side, had done nothing to provoke watchfulness by any resistance to their guardianship. So, finding them thus indifferent, little by little he edged him away from their neighborhood, moving very cautiously and gradually as one who scarcely seemed to move at all till he backed against a tree, against which he leaned lazily for some seconds. Once in front of a tree it was but simple strategy to slip to the other side of its trunk, and this feat Simon, choosing his time wisely, accomplished dexterously and unnoticed. Had he been by misluck interrupted in his progress, he relied upon his mighty strength to overthrow any six who sought to restrain him, and to make a bolt for it into the thickness of the wood where he believed he might effectually evade pursuit. But he wished, if it might be, to glide away in quiet, and fortune favored the adventurer. A floating fleece of cloud, stray fragment of the shattered dragon that seemed to obey Argathona's incantation, had again muffled the moonlight. In the gloom Simon was on his hands and knees in the brushwood and threading his way on all-fours with amazing celerity among the trees into the deep of the forest. Thus it came to pass that when the duchess demanded Simon, Simon was not forthcoming. "He was here a moment since," one man-at-arms asserted, lying hardily, as he stared into the vacant faces of his fellows. "Belike he has slipped into the wood," another suggested, shading his eyes with his hands and peering into the impenetrable gloom behind him.