Pelleas was wearing a gold chain that bore a cross hanging above the left breast, but with no cross over the right. Looking more keenly, Igraine saw a broken link still hanging from the right portion of the chain. Instinctively her thoughts fled back to the silent manor in the wood, and the dead man seated stiffly in the great carved chair. Without duly weighing the possible gravity of her words, she began to tell Pelleas of the incident. "Yesterday," she said, "I saw a strange thing as we fled through the wold. We came to a villa, and, seeking food there, found it deserted, save for a dead man seated in a chair, and stricken in the breast. The dead man had a small gold cross clutched in his fingers, and there was a dead hound at his feet." The man gave her a keen look from the depths of his dark eyes, and then glanced at the broken chain. "You see that I have lost a cross," he said. Igraine nodded. "Your reason can read the rest." She nodded again. "There is nothing like the truth." Igraine stared at the man in some astonishment. He was cold as a frost, and there was no shadow of discomfort on his strong face. Knowledge had come to her so sharply that she had no answer for him at the moment. Yet there stood a sublime certainty in her heart that this violent deed was deserving of absolute approval, so soon had her faith in him become like steel. "The man deserved death," she said presently, with a curt and ingenuous confidence. Pelleas eyed her curiously. "How should you know?" he asked. "I have faith in you," was all she said. Pelleas smiled, despite the subject. "No man deserved death better." "And so you slew him." He nodded without looking at her, and she could see still the embers of wrath in his eyes. "I slew him in his own manor, finding him alone, and ready to justify himself with lies. Honour does not love such deeds; but what would you?--Britain is free of a viper." "And you have blood on your hand." He winced slightly, and glanced at his fingers as though she had not spoken in metaphor. "All is blood in these days," he said. "And what think you of such laws?" she ventured, with a supreme reaching after the requirements of her Order. "What of the Cross?" "There was blood upon it." "But the blood of self-sacrifice." Her words moved him more than she had purposed. His dark face flushed, and light kindled in his eyes as though the basal tenets of his life had been called in question. He glowed like a man whose very creed is threatened. Igraine watched the fire rising in him with a secret pleasure,--the love of a woman for the hot courage of a man. "Listen to me," he said strongly; "which think you is the worthier life: to dream in a stone cell mewed from the world like a weak weed in a cellar, or to go forth with a red heart and a mellow honour; to strive and smite for the weak and the wounded; to right the wrong; to avenge the fatherless? Choose and declare."