When he had mounted and come down to the place where the blue knight had turned aside, Aymery turned aside also into the woods. A little way in, under the trees where a bank rose covered with bracken, he found a track that had been trampled leading to a place where someone seemed to have lain. But he saw nothing else beyond the tree boles, the cool green foliage, and the bracken splashed here and there with sunlight. When he called, no voice answered him, so he rode out of the wood and went his way. Yet there was more in the wood than he had seen, nor did he guess that he would meet again with the rider on the grey horse. On the evening of the second day Aymery came to the hills by Montifeld, and saw the Senlac uplands smitten by the evening light. Beyond Watlingtun he found a man mowing grass beside the road, and stopped to question him concerning Denise. The man pointed towards Mountjoye Hill, for they could see from where they stood the thatched roof of the cell above the thorn hedge. “The Virgin’s cell is yonder, lording,” he said, thinking perhaps that Aymery rode thither to be cured of some wound, and that he would be disappointed, for the Lady of Healing had worked no cures since they had brought her to the Abbey lands. Denise was at her prayers, kneeling on the threshold with the door of the cell wide open, when she heard the trampling of Aymery’s horse, a sound from the outer world that made her heart stand still and listen. There was a minute’s silence before she heard the latch of the gate lifted, and someone moving through the unmown grass. “Aymery! Lord!” He saw the wave of colour go over her face, for he had come upon her suddenly as she knelt there upon the threshold. The rush of blood from the heart died down again. She looked at him, and prayed that he should not see that she was trembling. Denise rose up from her knees as though the sound of her own voice had broken some spell. A kind of dumb discomfiture possessed them both. Aymery, with the sunlight shining on his battle harness, felt challenged by his own silence. The words he had meant to utter stuck in his throat, for that wave of redness over the woman’s face had somehow made him feel ungenerous and a coward. What right had he to come galloping into her life again, when they had put a day of dreams behind them? And like a man who would be honest, he stumbled to the blunt perfunctoriness of a boy going down on his knees in a church. There was something to be gone through with, and the sooner the better, since he had begun so clumsily. Many women would have misunderstood the mood in him. Denise understood it, perhaps more clearly than Aymery himself. “Yes?” Her eyes questioned him, more than her voice. Aymery put his shield before him as he knelt. “I have been with Earl Simon,” he said, looking at his shield. “It is to be the sword on the shoulder, and a pair of spurs.”