Isoult sat and listened, her hood pulled down over her face. These cattle! They whinneyed, squealed, grunted, blew wind between blubbering lips, pranced, butted each other. And in the midst of all this obscene clowning there were three faces that haunted her—Wat the Tiler’s, Guy’s, and the face of Merlin the Priest. She had seen the same elemental hunger in the eyes of these three men, a lust that watched and waited to seize on the thing that it desired. A sudden loathing of her own body rose in her, a loathing of a thing that might be carrion, to judge by the crows that watched and waited. And mingled with this loathing was all the horror of helplessness that overtakes one in the midst of an evil dream. CHAPTER XVI The window was full of the deep blue gloom of a summer night, with stars shining like the feathers of silver arrows shot into a target. A black curtain shut off the window recess from the King’s council chamber within, where candles burnt in sconces on the walls. In this window recess in the south wall of the White Tower two men stood talking in whispers—great lords both of them, the Earls of Salisbury and Warwick. The shorter of the two had opened one of the lattices, and was kneeling with one knee on the padded seat. He rapped with his fingers on the stone sill, and watched the sentinels going to and fro upon the walls, and the river sliding smoothly under the stars. The night was very still—so still that they could hear the stream plashing along the walls by the water-gate. Hardly a sound came from the city, and the very muteness of the night seemed ominous and strange. A clashing of arms, sudden and sharp, in the courtyard below, and the tramp of feet, told of the changing of the guard. A voice shouted orders. From beyond the curtain came a queer, whimpering sound as of a girl hiding her head in her cloak and weeping. The man who knelt on the cushions turned sharply, and his lips were drawn back over his teeth. “Psst—listen to that! Such snivelling when the kingdom’s turned upside down!” “Not too loud!” “What will happen when he hears the wolves howling under the walls! And Walworth could promise——?” “But little. Eight thousand burghers skulking in their houses behind closed doors; and thirty thousand ready to shout for the gates to be opened.” Warwick turned fiercely and glanced up into Salisbury’s face—a massive, stolid, cautious face, in no hurry to betray emotion. “What’s to be done? Are we to let this herd of swine root up the whole kingdom?” “Ring their snouts, my friend.” “And who’s to do the ringing? That—that—in yonder!” They turned by some common impulse and stared at the black curtain that hid them from the council chamber. “The lad has no more heart in him than a hare!” “He is what he is.”