With the memory of Gorlois a cloud dulled the clear mirror of her mind, and her mood of dreams melted into mist. The strong sense of bondage, of ineffectual treason, came back with a fuller force as though to menace her with the fateful realism of her lot. A hand seemed to sweep down and wave her back with a meaning so sinister that even her hate stood still a moment as in sudden fear; she had some such feeling as of standing on the brink of a mysterious sea whose waves sang to her a song of peril, of misery and desire cooped up together in the dim green twilight of some coral dungeon. The lure of the unknown beat upon her eyes, while love and hate, like attendant spirits, beckoned her over the yawn of an open grave. For the moment the importunity of her immediate need drew her from meditations alike bitter and divine. A battlefield after dark, with all its lust and pillage, was no pleasant place for a woman. The lights of the town still showed up brightly in the west, but Igraine had little desire of the teeming streets where victory would be matching blood with wine, and where the revels of the soldiery would celebrate the day in primal fashion. She was content to be alone under the stars, and even the dead seemed more sympathetic than the living at such an hour. A wind had risen, and she heard the hoarse "salvé" of the forest in the night. The thousand voices of the trees seemed to call to her with a weird perpetual clamour. She saw their spectral hands jerking and clutching against the sky, and heard the creak and gibber of the criss-cross boughs swaying in the wind. Leaving the hillock, and still bearing Brastias's sword, she held across the open, seeing as she went the dark streaks that dotted the hillside--the bodies of men fallen in the flight. She gained the trees, and was soon deep among the crowded trunks, pondering on her lodging for the night. Wandering hither and thither, looking for some more sheltered spot, her glance lighted on a dim swelling of the ground that proved to be an ancient mound or barrow. It had been opened in times past, probably in the search for buried treasure or for weapons. Brambles, weeds, and heather had roofed the shallow cutting into a little recess or cave that gave fair shelter from the wind, and Igraine, braving the notion of barrow ghost or spirit, claimed the place as a God-send, and took cover therein.