How great his need was became apparent before they had reached the clearing amid the beech trees. The man stumbled and faltered at every step, his head fell forward, he muttered incoherently, like one in the heat of a fever. Denise felt his weight bearing more heavily upon her arm. His head drooped, and rested upon her shoulder. Before they reached the wattle gate of the garden the conscious life was out of him, and Denise, borne down like a vine-ladened sapling bent by the wind, let the man slip from her gently to the ground. She stood irresolute a moment, then stooping and putting her two hands under his shoulders, she found that she could drag him slowly up the stone path into her cell. Once within she closed the door, and slipping off her cloak, she covered the slit of a window with it. There was a little earthen lamp in the cell, and Denise sought and found it in the darkness, also tinder, flint, and steel. Yet her hands shook so with her labour of bearing up under Aymery’s weight, that it was a minute or more before she had the lamp burning. Setting it upon a stone sconce in the wall, she bent over Aymery, the light of the lamp making his face seem white as the face of the dead. Her brown eyes grew frightened at the sight of his wounds, and at the way he lay so quiet, and so still. But there was something greater than fear in Denise’s heart that night. In a corner of the cell were some rough boards covered with dry bracken, a coarse white sheet, and a coverlet of wool. Denise, putting her arms once more under the man’s body, half dragged and half lifted him to her own rough bed. CHAPTER VII The night was far spent, and the oil in the earthen lamp had failed some hours ago. Denise, sitting in the darkness, with her chin resting on her hands, listened to Aymery’s breathing, and waited for the dawn. Nerving herself, she had twisted the arrow’s head from the flesh, unlaced his hauberk and bound up the wounded shoulder, and poured some wine between his lips. For a long time she had watched him for signs of returning consciousness. Then the lamp had died out and left them in the darkness, and Denise had sat wondering whether the man’s quietude meant sleep or death. Denise did not close her eyes that night. She was wakeful, strangely wakeful, almost conscious of the beating of her heart. More than once she had bent forward and touched Aymery’s hand, and its coldness chilled her, so that she longed for the day. Often too in the strained suspense of the night’s silence she would fancy that he had ceased to breathe, and she would fall a-praying with a passion that startled even her own heart.