How long or whither he ran Fulk of the Forest never knew. Isoult’s last cry had flung him forward into blind, physical activity that was fanatical and dazed. He blundered through the underwood and between the trunks of trees, hardly feeling the hazel rods stinging his face. Once he crashed into an oak bole, and went on with his head singing. A voice kept crying in him, “Run, run!” and his limbs and his senses were mere brute beasts that served. Fulk ran for some three miles before the self suddenly awoke in him like a raw wound uncovered to the air. He faltered in his stride, dropped to a walk, and then stood still, staring at the ground in front of him, as though he had been running in his sleep. “Isoult!” He thrust out his hands with a fierce cry, and then covered his face with his forearms. Vision had come to him so vividly and with such bitterness that he rocked as he stood and breathed like a man in pain. Dead! He could not believe it. Her lips were still alive to his, and her hands still thrilled him. Had it all happened, that passionate conspiring of theirs, that rushing together through the darkness, that mad, exultant love flight? He heard again her cry when the arrow struck her, her fierce pleading with him to leave her, and felt her arms holding him and her lips pressing themselves to his. Mother of God, those lips of hers! They had left him on fire, those lips of hers, and she herself was dead. A savage compassion swept over him, an impotent and furious love rage that struggled against a sense of utter and incredible emptiness. “Isoult!” He bit the flesh of his wrist, and cursed himself. She was dead by now for his sake, this incomparable, strange creature, with all her fierce, wayward pride. Why had he run away and left her to Merlin? She was his, though dead; the hands, the lips, the eyes were his. He should have fought it to a finish with that scum of serfdom, and not left her alone in death. It was monstrous, damnable, fit only for the spittle of a superhuman scorn. What had he lost? And yesterday his eyes were blind! He saw it all now in a flare of tenderness, her desire to save him, and the stiffneckedness of his own pride. What was he that she should have suffered to save him, that she should have stooped to a lie against her honour, and lost her life at the hands of Merlin and these boors? Merlin! His passion turned like a wounded boar, seeing something to strike at, something to slay. By the Cross, he would make amends, come by arms and horse, and join himself to those who were ready to trample this stubble of the fields into the mud. And this knife of Isoult’s that he had at his girdle should be kept for Merlin—the grey friar. CHAPTER XIV The terror was abroad, such terror as had not possessed the land since the days of the Black Death.