"Dear father," she whispered, faintly; but, the next moment, an expression of fear was visible in all her features, and a palpable shiver shook all her frame. "The stag!" she murmured; "the stag! save me, save"--and before the word, uttered simultaneously by the two lords--"He is dead, dear one," "He will harm no one any more"--had reached her ears, she again relapsed into insensibility, while with equal care, but renewed hope, they tended and caressed her. But Kenric no one tended, no one caressed, save, "faithful still, where all were faithless found," the brindled staghound, "Kilbuck," who licked his face assiduously, with his grim, gory tongue and lips, and besmearing his face with blood and foam, rendered his aspect yet more terrible and death-like. But now the returning messengers began to ride in, fast and frequent; first, old Raoul, the huntsman, surest, although not fleetest, and with him, shaking in his saddle, between the sense of peril and the perplexity occasioned him by the high, hard trot of the Norman war-horse pressed into such unwonted service, "like a boar's head in aspick jelly," the brother mediciner from the neighboring convent, with his wallet of simples and instruments of chirurgery. By his advice, the plentiful application of cold water, with essences and stimulants in abundance, a generous draught of rich wine of Burgundy, and, when animation seemed thoroughly revived, the gentle breathing of a vein, soon restored the young lady to her perfect senses and complete self-possession, though she was sorely bruised, and so severely shaken that it was enjoined on her to remain perfectly quiet, where she lay, with a Lincoln-green furred hunting-cloak around her, until the arrival of the litter should furnish means of return to the castle of her father's host and kinsman. And, in good season, down the hill, slowly and toilsomely came the horse-litter, poor substitute for a wheeled vehicle; but even thus the best, if not only, conveyance yet adopted for the transport of the wounded, the feeble, or the luxurious, and, as such, used only by the wealthy and the noble. With the litter came three or four women; one or two, Norman maidens, the immediate attendants of the Lady Guendolen, and the others, Saxon slave girls of the household of Sir Philip de Morville, who hurried down, eager to gain favor by show of zealous duty, or actuated by woman's feelings for woman's suffering, even in different grades and station. The foremost of them all, bounding along with all the wild agility and free natural gracefulness of wood-nymph or bacchante, was a girl of seventeen or eighteen, not above the middle height of her sex, but plump as a partridge, with limbs exquisitely formed and rounded, a profusion of flaxen tresses floating unrestrained on the air, large dark-blue eyes, and a complexion all of milk and roses--the very type of rural Saxon youth and beauty.