While the roads smoked with these marchings and counter-marchings, and while spears shone on the hill-tops, and steel trickled through the green, Denise cheated death in that quiet valley amid the Surrey hills. Marpasse’s knife had turned between the ribs, missed the heart by the breadth of a finger nail, and let Denise’s blood flow, but not her life. Marpasse’s rough sense had saved her, Marpasse who had saved the body, while Aymery had been busy with the soul. And yet to the nuns Denise’s return out of the valley of the shadows had seemed nothing short of a miracle. Ursula, true to her belief, had seized the first glimmer of consciousness and sent for the priest who served the convent as confessor. But Denise had put the good man off, pleading that she would not die, and that she was too weak to tell him so long a tale. The first few days Denise lay in her bed, very white and very silent, taking the wine and food they brought her, and speaking hardly a word. She was like one half awakened from sleep, able to feel and think, but with the languor of sleep still on her. She felt that it was good to lie there in peace, aloof from the world, with the quiet figures gliding in and out, and the sunlight moving in a golden beam with the floor of the little room for a dial. The ringing of the convent bells came to her, and the singing of the nuns in the chapel. Denise lay very still through the long hours in a haze of dreamy thought. How much did she remember? Enough to inspire her with a new desire to live, enough to make her realise how mad had been the impulse that had set Marpasse’s knife a-flashing. They seemed so far away, and yet so near and intimate, those happenings in the April woodland. In moments of deep passion the human heart seizes on what is vital and utterly true, even as those who are dying sometimes seem to see beyond the bounds of the material earth. So Denise remembered that which a woman’s heart would choose to cherish. It had been no mere golden mist of pity glazing the cold truth. She had lain in Aymery’s arms, arms that had held her with something stronger than compassion. Thus as Denise lay there abed, a slow, sweet faith revived within her, a belief in things that had seemed dry and dead. Her woman’s pride had been in the dust, and she had given up hope, save the hope of hiding in some far place. It might have been that Aymery’s arms had closed an inward wound, and that the strength of his manhood had given her new life.