She let go of Denise, and they gathered up their skirts and started off, scudding between the tree boles, never stopping to look back. Denise did not feel her feet under her. The brown leaves, the coarse grass, and the wild flowers were like so much water over which she seemed to skim, yet not so swiftly as her fear fled. She was quicker than Marpasse, because her passion to escape burnt at a greater heat. Marpasse had torn her skirt on a stub and was panting when they came to the farther edge of the wood. They paused a moment, and stood listening, and could hear the confused hum of the host like the humming of bees. A meadow lay before them, bounded by a second wood that towered up the steep slope of a hill. Against the blue a lark hung with quivering wings, and quivering song. As they stood listening a shout rose in the deeps of the wood behind them. Denise was off like a deer, her whole soul quivering like the wings of the lark overhead. Marpasse stayed a second to pull up a stocking that had slipped to her ankle, and then ran on after Denise across the meadow. They were close to the outstanding trees of the second wood, when Denise looked back and saw that they were followed. The two men-at-arms who had had the guarding of them had been too shrewd to go beating through the trees on foot when they had begun to suspect Marpasse of playing a trick on them. They had mounted their horses, and ridden different ways so as to circle the wood and gain a view of the two vixens when they took to the open. Marpasse cursed them for their pains. “Another minute, and we should have been out of sight,” she said; “we may yet trick them in the wood.” They kept together now, labouring uphill with faces that began to betray distress. Marpasse had a stitch in her side, her stockings were at her ankles, and her hair over her shoulders. They could hear the men shouting, but paid no heed to it, for if there were but thicker cover on the other side of the hill, they might take to it and escape. As they topped the slope they heard the trampling of horses in the valley behind them. Marpasse looked eagerly to right and left, and an angry cry escaped her, for a wood of great forest trees dipped gently away from them, the trunks pillaring broad aisles that were carpeted with sleek and brilliant sward. A man could see through the wood as though looking along the aisles of a church, where children could do no more than play hide-and-seek round the piers and pillars. “No luck for us! They can ride us down here almost as well as in a meadow.” Denise caught Marpasse’s arm. “The knife, Marpasse; give it me.” Marpasse was panting, one hand at her side. “No, no, not that, my dear!” “I will not be taken alive, Marpasse. Give me the knife, and run. They will not trouble you when they find me here.” Marpasse drew Denise behind the trunk of a great tree, for she had seen a helmet come up over the edge of the hill, to be followed by the tossing mane of a horse.