He sat awhile beside the fire, brooding and fingering his chin. Isoult had gone out into the orchard, but when he sought her there she was not to be found. Merlin crossed himself, and turned back towards the White Lodge. “A woman’s anger is not to be trusted,” he said to himself, “for oftentimes it rises out of the passion it pretends to scorn. I must feel how that young man’s heart beats. Hot blood is very helpful.” Isoult, hidden among some yew trees on the side of the hill above the orchard, watched Merlin’s grey frock disappear into the green of the woods. Her face shone white and hard, but in her eyes there was something of wonder, even of fear. CHAPTER X Fulk sat in the doorway of the hermit’s cell and watched the dusk come down—the slow, subtle dusk of a still May evening. The beech wood had been full of the singing of birds, and on the top of a holly near the quarry’s mouth a thrush had poured out all its joy and desire, its grey-brown breast turned towards the sunset. The beech foliage had changed from vivid green to amethyst, the trunks from grey to black, while orange, amber, and saffron were flung abroad across an exultant west. Now, later still, the woods rose in soft, rounded blackness against a deep blue sky, with the crescent of the moon clear as polished steel. Fulk sat there brooding, his face growing grey in the dusk. The smoke of a fire rose beyond the mouth of the quarry—a grey, sinuous pillar that swayed slightly from side to side or thrust out a ghostly arm when some breath of wind played upon it. Now and again a voice growled sulkily, but since the birds had ceased their singing the silence had become immense, irrefutable, supreme. Presently there was a crackling of brushwood. The pillar of smoke swelled to a cloud of draughty vapour; dead wood had been thrown on the fire, and the flames licked through it and rose as crimson and yellow tongues against the blackness of the beech wood. A sense of restlessness seemed to come from nowhere and to show itself in the wavering lights and shadows that played under the boughs of the beeches. Fulk saw a solitary figure outlined against the fire, thrusting a pole under the burning brushwood, and looking, with the jagged comb of its hood, like a sinister black devil. Something moved in the mouth of the quarry, a patch of greyness that disassociated itself from the vague gloom of the brambles and furze. Fulk’s chin went up, and his eyes were on the alert. The figure shaped itself into that of a grey friar, and Fulk guessed it to be Father Merlin. He came gliding in like a ghost. A grey arm went up and gave Fulk a benediction. “Peace to you, Fulk Ferrers.” Merlin sat himself down on the stone seat outside the cell, with his staff across his knees. His cowl was drawn, and Fulk could not see his face, but merely a patch of blackness where the face should be.