In an hour from their first coming the beech wood was silent and empty, and Denise’s cell lay with its dark thatch like an islet in the midst of a quiet mere. Not a ripple of sound played over the surface of the night. Aymery and Grimbald had gone to warn their own people that death was abroad on the White Horse. And Denise, sitting on her bed, wakeful, and filled with a great pity for Waleran and the lad, felt that the stealthy glamour of the moonlight was cold and unreal. If her compassion followed Waleran, a feeling more deep and more mysterious followed Aymery under the boughs of the beeches. Yet this feeling of Denise’s was as miraculous as the moonlight which she thought so cold and mute. The two men made their way through the wood by a broad green ride, and stood listening where the heathland began for any sound that might steal out of the vast silence of the night. Grimbald’s great head, with its gaunt, eagle face, the colour of smoked oak, had the full moon behind it for a halo. Aymery of Goldspur stood a little below him on the hillside, leaning on his sword. His thoughts were back among the trees about Denise’s glade, those towering trees whose boughs seemed hung with the stars. Below them stretched wastes of whin and heather, hills black with forests, valleys full of moonlit mist. They could see the sea shining in the distance, a whole land beneath them, ghostly, strange, and still. “It is all quiet yonder.” Grimbald’s head was like the head of a hawk, alert and very watchful. “They have done enough for one night,” he said. “To make us keep troth with the King!” Both were silent for a moment. Grimbald spoke the thought that was uppermost in Aymery’s mind. “It is no longer safe for the girl alone, yonder,” he said. Aymery, that man with the iron mouth and the square chin, and eyes the colour of the winter sea, spread his shoulders as an archer spreads them before drawing a six-foot bow. “I will see to it,” he said quietly. “Nothing must happen to Denise.” CHAPTER II The little red spider of a man who pattered along beside Gaillard’s horse, looked up from time to time into the Gascon’s face, and thought what a great pageant life must be to a soldier who had such a body and so much pay. For the little red spider was a cripple, and nothing more glorious than a spy, a thing that crawled like a harvest bug, and might have been squashed without ceremony under the Gascon’s fist. As for Gaillard he was a very great man, cock and captain of Count Peter’s chickens, those most meek birds who scratched up obstinate worms, and kept their lord’s land clean of grubs.