Denise was caught by an impulse that took no account of self and of fear. She went down the stairway and into the street, only to find the door of the shop barred. Her hand was still on the latch when the door opened. The man Hervé came out, huddling something under his surcoat, his sword in the moonlight showing a shadowy smear. He stopped dead on the threshold, staring at Denise, and then pushed past her roughly, and fled up the street. There was a light burning somewhere behind the shop, probably in the bakehouse where Fulcon and dog Ban lived and slept. Denise went in, wondering what she would find there, nor was she long in discovering Messire Hervé’s handiwork. A candle was burning in a sconce on the wall, and close to the great brick oven lay Fulcon, stretched upon his back, one arm covering his face as though to shut out the sight of something, or to break the force of a blow. Ban, in his death agony, had dragged himself to his master, and crouched there with his forepaws on the baker’s chest. They were dead, both of them, Fulcon and the dog. A black hole in the wall showed above the place where Fulcon had fallen, and the stone that had closed the hole lay close to the old man’s head. Fulcon had hidden his hoard there, the money that he had scraped together with infinite labour for the sake of Hervé his son. Denise could guess what had happened. Fulcon had not been willing to part with the whole sum, because of his dream that Hervé would need it when he came by knighthood. And the son had watched the father go to the hiding-place in the wall, and then had beaten him down, and taken all that he could find. A great horror of the place seized on Denise, with the two dead things lying there, and the brutal violence of the deed making old Fulcon’s end seem pitiful and ugly. The horror of it drew her out into the night, as though to escape the sickly odour of freshly shed blood. Shuddering, she went up to her room, put on her cloak, and tied such money as she had left into a corner of her tunic. The grossness of the deed had shocked her, so that she fled away like a child from a haunted wood, forgetting such a thing as justice, and the fact that her tongue might drop a noose over Master Hervé’s head. Whither she was going, or what her plans were, Denise did not consider for the moment. Blind panic carried her away from a thing that had filled her with pity, and yet with disgust. She seemed hardly conscious of the fact that fighting was still raging in the town. Houses were on fire not fifty yards away, but the scattering sparks and the glare above the house-tops seemed hardly to strike her senses. The burning houses threw up a flare to match the horror that possessed her; such surroundings seemed natural and to be expected after Hervé’s slaying and robbing of his father.