The girl looked at him unreservedly for a moment. Then she gave a little laugh that was half a sob, and, bending to him, kissed his hand before he could prevent her. Giving him yet another glance from her tumbled hair, she stepped aside to Igraine, and they turned together towards the manor, and the trees and gardens that ringed it. The girl had set her hand in Igraine's with a little gesture that was intended to be indicative of confidence in the supposed nun's greater intelligence. "Let us go and sit under that yew tree," she suggested. "I cannot stifle within walls now. You are named Igraine. I am called Morgan--Morgan la Blanche,--and I am a lord's daughter. I almost envy you your frock now, for death cannot frighten you as it frightens me. Of course you are very good, and the Saints guard and watch over you. As for me, I have always been very thoughtless." "Not more than I," said Igraine, with a smile. "I have often hummed romances when I should have praised Paul or Peter." "But doesn't the fear of death blight you like a frost?" "I never think of death." "It seems so near us now that I can hardly breathe. Do you think we are tortured in the other world, if there be one?" "How should I know, simple one?" "I wish the mere were a league broad. I should feel further from the pit." "Is your conscience so unkind?" "Conscience, sister? It is self-love, not conscience. I only want to live. Look!--the heathen are coming down to the mere. How their axes shine. Holy Mother!--I wish I could pray." Igraine, catching the girl's pinched face, with lips drawn and twitching, pitied her from her very heart. "Come then, I will pray with you," she said. "No, no, my prayers would blacken heaven. I cannot, I cannot." The wild company had swept down between the great trees in disorderly array. Their weapons shone in the sunlight, their round bucklers blickered. They were soon at the place where Pelleas had slain his men in fair and open field. Dismounting, they gathered about their dead fellows, and sent up, after their custom, a vicious, dismal ululation, a sound like the howling of wolves, drear enough to make the flesh tingle under the stoutest steel. Lining the bank among the willows, they shook buckler and axe, gesticulating, threatening, their long hair blowing wild, their skin-clad bodies giving them a wolfin look not pleasant to behold. Round the margin they paddled--searching--casting about for a boat. They seemed like beasts behind the gates of some Roman amphitheatre--caged from the slaughter. The girl Morgan looked at them, screamed, and hid her face in her tunic. Igraine found the girl's quaking hand, and held it fast in hers. "Courage, courage," she said; "there is no boat, and, even if they swim, Sir Pelleas is a great knight." "What can he do against fifty?" whined the girl, with her face still covered. "Fifty? There are but a score. I have numbered them myself." "I would give all the jewels in the world to be in Winchester."