As she climbed back again from the mound, a gashed and clotted face heaved up and stared at her from a heap of slain. It was the face of a man who had struggled up on his hands to look at her with mouth agape, dazed after a sudden waking from the stupor of a swoon. For a moment in the moonlight she thought it was Gorlois by certain likeness of feature, but discovered her error when the man spoke to her in gibberish she did not understand. He began to crawl towards her with a certain air of menace that made her start back and rear up the sword she had taken from dead Brastias. The threat of steel proved needless enough, for the man dropped again with a wet groan, and seemed dead when she went and bent over him with thoughts of succour. Passing back again to her hillock, she stood there brooding and looking out towards the west. A great bell in the town by the sea was pulsing heavily as though for the dead, and there were many cressets flaring on the walls, and torches going to and fro in the meadows. The sound of a triumph hymn chanted by hundreds of deep voices floated up like a prayer from the western meadows. At the sound Igraine's eyes were strangely full of tears. By some strange echoing of the mind the idyls of past days woke like the song of birds after a storm of rain. Clear in the dusk she seemed to see the red figure on the black horse, his face lit like a god's by the slanting light from the west as he stretched his sword to heaven. Again the scene changed, and she saw him riding through the flowering meads of Andredswold, looking down on her with a grave and luminous pity. She was glad of him, glad of his great glory, glad that he had kissed her lips, and bewrayed the love to her that was in his heart. The scene and the occasion were strange enough for such broodings, yet her eyes were very dim as she stood in a half-dream and let the picture drift across her mind. The revelation had come upon her with such suddenness that she had been for the moment like one dazed. She had watched Uther sweep on with his horde of knights, and had stood mute and impotent as one smitten dumb while the red harness and the golden dragon of Britain vanished again into the moil of war. Now her whole soul yearned out with a wistfulness born of infinite regret. If he had only come to her alone; if he had only come to her as Pelleas in some gloom of green, she could have fallen down before his horse's feet, kissed the scabbard of his sword, wept over his helmet, and burnished it with her hair. Sight of that dark sad face had made a beacon of her on the instant. And Gorlois! If she had hated him yesterday, she hated him with a tenfold vigour since she had looked again upon Pelleas's face. Certainly her malice had grown with an Antæan strength with each humbling of her heart to the dust, and the very thought of Gorlois seemed blasphemy against her soul at such an hour.