Some three or four--inferior barons of the train, yet each a gentleman of lineage and prowess in the field, each one in his own estimate a prince’s peer--had paused around the desolate father and his murdered child; and now, as the old man gazed hopelessly upon the features of his first-born and his only, the sympathy which had moistened their hard eyes and relaxed their iron features was swallowed up in a fierce glare of indignation, irradiating their scarred and war-seamed visages with that sublime expression, from which, when glowing on the face of a resolute and fearless man, the wildest savage of the forest will shrink in mute dismay. The father, after a long and fearful struggle with his more tender feelings--wringing his hard hands till the blood-drops started redly from beneath every nail--lifted his face, more pale and ashy in its hues than that of the inanimate form which he had loved so tenderly; and as he lifted it he caught the fierce glow mantling on the front of each well-tried companion, and his own features lightened with the self-same blaze: his hand sank downward to the hilt of the long poniard at his girdle, and the fingers worked with a convulsive tremor as they griped the well-known pommel, and an exulting smile curled his mustached lip, prophetic of revenge. Once more he bowed above the dead; he laid his broad hand on the pulseless heart, and printed a long kiss on the forehead; then lifting, with as much tenderness as though they still had sense and feeling, the relics of the only thing he loved on earth, he bore them from the roadside into the shelter of a tangled coppice; unbuckled his long military mantle, and spreading it above them, secured it at each corner by heavy stones, a temporary shelter from insult or intrusion. This done, in total silence he rejoined his friends, who had foreborne to offer aid where they perceived it would be held superfluous. Without one word, he grasped the bridle of his charger, tightened his girths, and then, setting no foot to stirrup, vaulted almost without an effort into the steel-bound demipique. Raising his arm aloft, he pointed into the long aisles of the forest, wherein the followers of Rufus had long since disappeared. “Our thoughts are one!” he hissed, in accents scarcely articulate, between his grinded teeth; “what need of words? Are not we soldiers, gentlemen, and Normans, and shall not deeds speak for us?” _Truly_ he said, their thoughts were one!--for each had severally steeled his heart as by a common impulse: and now, without a word, or sign, or any interchange of sentiments, feeling that each understood the other, they wheeled their horses on the tyrant’s track, and at a hard trot rode away, resolved on instant vengeance.