“Ah, to be sure; his men took all my bread one day last year, and I had not so much as a farthing.” His voice grumbled down in the bass notes, and Ban sympathised with a growl. The woman felt in her bag. “I can pay you,” she said, “a little. I can work, too, if you wish it.” Fulcon narrowed his eyes suspiciously, and looked at Ban as though for advice. The dog wagged his tail. That wag of the tail decided it. “Come up and see,” he said. “I have a little room under the roof.” And all three went in together, Fulcon, the dog, and Denise. Whether it was Ban’s friendship, or Fulcon’s complacency in turning a good penny by letting his attic, Denise tarried there in the baker’s house, glad to find a corner in the world where she could rest awhile in peace. Fulcon lived quite alone, though an old woman came in now and again to cook, clean, and sew. The house was of stone, and roofed also with flags of stone, because of sparks from the bakehouse furnace. The upper room where Denise lodged was reached by an outside stairway from the yard. There was a small garden and orchard shut in by the walls and gable ends of other houses. As for Fulcon he lived in his bakery behind the shop, he and Ban sleeping together in one corner like two brown dogs curled up in a heap. Often there was baking to be done at night, and then Fulcon dozed in the shop by day, the dog keeping an eye open for customers, boys, and thieves. It is one of the facts of life that gruff and surly people are more to be trusted than those with burnished faces and ready tongues, and so it turned out with old Fulcon. For Denise found him steady and honest. The neighbours declared that Fulcon was a miser. True, he worked like a brown gnome, round-backed, laborious, and silent. No man baked bread better than Fulcon; nor had he ever sold short weight. So Denise found herself tarrying day after day in the town under the chalk hills, where the beech woods clambered against the sky, and life seemed still and quiet. Though Earl Simon had taken Reigate the year before, no memory of violence and of bloodshed seemed to linger there, and the valley amid the hills waited peacefully for the spring. Denise had come very near to death that year, and the heart in her still carried a deep and open wound. She had changed, too, in those few weeks. Her glorious hair was growing long again, and her eyes had a more miraculous sadness. She was thinner in face, yet plumper at the bosom. Some people might have discovered an indefinable air about her, a subtle, human something that was not to be seen on the face of a nun.