“May your beard grow, sir. And have a care how you play with that pole in your harness. Not God Almighty could fish you out of the mud if you tumbled overboard in all that gear!” Cavendish mounted his horse, and Jock shouldered his quarter-staff, and Fulk watched them disappear up the narrow meadow that lost itself in the gloom of the woods. Then he picked up the pole to ferry back to Isoult. CHAPTER XXX She was not there when Fulk turned the boat; the little landing-stage was deserted. Isoult had gone into the house. He dropped the pole lazily into the shallows, and heard the water prattling at the prow, and as the boat moved over towards the island a surge of emotion rose in him, a sudden wonder, something akin to awe. The long slants of sunlight made blurs of gold about him on the water. The woods seemed fringed with fire. The evening was very strange and very still. The boat had glided within ten yards of the island when Fulk saw Isoult come out of the timber porch and down through a rose and herb garden to the landing-stage. She had thrown off her cloak and her steel cap and hood, and changed swiftly into a woman—a woman in a grey-blue tunic slashed and edged with green. It left her throat and her forearms bare, and was crossed by a girdle of green leather, where it fitted like a sheath about her hips. Her hair was held in a silver net, falling low over the nape of her neck and over her ears. Fulk stood motionless, the pole trailing in the water and the boat sliding slowly and more slowly towards the bank. He was wondering, mute. The witchery of it all possessed him: the still sun-steeped beauty of this lonely pool, the flaming woods, the woman who stood there looking down at him with mysterious eyes. His tongue had nothing to utter; his manhood seemed mute. The boat stopped within half a pole’s length of the stage, Fulk standing with the pole held slantwise, water dripping from it on to the still surface of the pool. Isoult laughed, and her soft, mysterious laughter went over the water. “Lording, will you not set foot on the solid earth?” Fulk drew in his breath deeply, dropped the end of the pole into the water, and brought the boat to the stage. Half mechanically, he threw out the chain, and Isoult slipped the ring over the mooring post. “Lording, let me serve!” She stretched out a hand to help him in his armour, and Fulk paused with one foot on the gunwale, looking at her intently from under the raised vizor of his bassinet. “Isoult!” Her eyes seemed to grow full of light, full of a mystery of things unspoken. “Come; I will unarm you, I will play the page.” He stepped ashore, still holding her hand and looking at her with a kind of wonder. His lips hardly moved when he uttered her name, “Isoult.”