To the phase of violent and savage hunger succeeded, with hours, a giddy dreaminess, the result of growing exhaustion. As the day wore on and exhaustion increased, his mind, like his body, refused to work connectedly; his feet often stumbled and he was incapable of consecutive thought. Once he found himself sitting with Griselda under a beech-tree, holding her fingers and considering how they had come there and why they had got to go on; and wandering off into vague recollection of the story of a knightly lover who had carried his mistress long miles through a forest in his arms. The details of the story escaped his memory and he sought for them with pettish insistence; with perhaps at the back of his mind some idea, born of brain-fag, that, did he but remember them, he could do the same service for Griselda. He had soon lost all sense of direction; but the instinct to hide never left him, and once or twice, when the wood seemed to be opening out, he drew his wife back to the solitude under the trees. With the passing of the hours their rests by the way grew longer; Griselda was able to keep her feet for a few minutes only before she muttered or signed a request for another halt. Whereat William would lower her to the ground where she propped herself against a tree-trunk or lay huddled and silent with closed eyes. At one such halt he fell suddenly and helplessly asleep; perhaps Griselda did the same, for though the sun was high when he sat him down the woods were heavy with blue dusk when she roused him by a tugging at his sleeve. She was craving again for water; her lips were cracked for the want of it. They rose and went blindly in search—halting every few minutes as much to strain their ears for the longed-for ripple as to give Griselda strength. More than once she was at failing point; so much so that he suggested she should lie down while he hunted further for a stream. She refused, trembling at the idea of being left alone—unreasonably, but perhaps wisely, since William, astray in the darkening woods, might well have had difficulty in finding his way to her again. The dusk was more than dusk before they found what they sought; it was actual darkness of night descending to cover the earth. They had halted perforce more than once when Griselda could go no further; but always her thirst burned her, and she rose and struggled forward again. She was past speaking when they came on a clearing, and then on a stream that ran through it, of which they were only aware when they trod into the marshy ground at its brim. She drank heavily, lay inert and seemed to sleep.