The night was dark and windy. None came to strike upon the hermit’s door, no human voice broke in upon them. The wind shook the forest behind the cell and scoured the valley in front. It whistled around their narrow refuge, it brought at intervals a dash of rain against door and wall. But the two within were warmed and fed, and they found an ocean-music in the night. It rocked them in their dreams, it soothed like a lullaby. The princess dreamed of her father, and that they were reading together in a book; then that changed, and it was her old, old nurse, who told her tales of elves and fays. Garin dreamed of the desert and then of the sea. Dawn came. They rekindled their fire and had spare breakfast, then fared forth through a high and stormy world. Night came, day came, nights and days, beads of light and its doings, beads of dimness and rest. They kept no list of the dangers they entered and left, of the incidents and episodes of peril. They were many, but the two went through like a singing shaft, like a shuttle driven by the hand of Genius. Now they were forth from the invaded princedom, now they were gone from fiefs of other suzerains. Where they had faced north, now they walked with the westering sun. When that happened, Jael the herd wore no longer the saffron cross. It had served the purpose, carrying her through Montmaure’s host, that else might not have let a woman pass.... The two had slept upon leaves in an angle of a stone wall, on the edge of a coppice. The wall ran by fields unharmed by war; they were out from the shadow. A dawn came up and unfolded like a rose of glory. The coppice seemed to sleep, the air was so still. The night had been dry, and for the season, warm. Cocks crew in the distance, birds that stayed out the year cheeped in the trees. The herd-girl took her frieze mantle, and, sitting upon a stone, broke the threads that bound to it the Church’s stigma and seal. The jongleur watched her from where he leaned against the wall. When it was free from the mantle, she took the shaped piece of saffron-dyed cloth and moving from the stone kneeled beside their fire of sticks and gave it to the flame. She watched it consume, then stood up. “It served me,” she said. “I know not if it ever served any upon whom it was truly chained. As I read the story, He who was nailed to the cross had a spirit strong and merciful. It is the spirits who are strong that are merciful.” The rose in the east grew in glory. Colour came into the land, into the coppice, and to the small vines and ferns in their niches and shrines between the stones. Garin of the Golden Island stood in green and brown, beside him the red-ribboned lute. “As the first day from Roche-de-Frêne, so now again,” said Audiart, “you are the jongleur, Elias of Montaudon. I am your _mie_, Jael the herd.” “Your will is mine, Jael the herd,” said Garin.