The sun was setting at La BelliÈre when a couple of men-at-arms wearing the Sieur de Tinteniac’s badge upon their sleeves came cantering along the road from Dinan. They wound through the poplar-trees and the beech thickets, flashing back the sunlight from their harness and raising a slight haze of dust that was turned to gold by the glow from the west. Riding up to the bridge, they hailed the porter who was closing the great gate and asked whether Sir Robin Raguenel had returned from Mivoie.

“For,” quoth the bulkier of the twain, “we are the Sieur de Tinteniac’s men, who has sent us jogging all the way from Montcontour with the news that he will try your master’s wine to-morrow.”

And so the Vicomte’s porter put back the gate for them, and Tinteniac’s men smelt the savory scent of the La BelliÈre kitchens. Nor was the news long in reaching the great salon where TiphaÏne and her father were playing chess, with Robin reading at the window. The lad went white when he heard the news and slunk out into the garden, sick at heart.

Heaven curse Tinteniac! What possessed him to come to La BelliÈre! Robin marched up and down under the apple-trees, biting his nails and smoothing his weak, round chin with the palm of his hand. The incubus of dread and remorse had grown heavier for him day by day he had lost both flesh and color, though a restless and feverish cheerfulness simulated the hectic confidence of a man who refuses to believe that death has him by the throat. And now the Sieur de Tinteniac was coming to La BelliÈre, and the lad’s guilty conscience fluttered like a girl in terror of a ghost.

At supper Robin saw the two men-at-arms seated among his father’s servants. They stared at him in all innocence, even as men stare at a fellow-mortal who has been blessed with the attributes of a hero. But to Robin, scared and suspicious, and ready to tread upon a snake in every corner, their interest in him suggested thoughts more sinister. Had Bertrand betrayed him, or had Beaumanoir and his lords discovered how the fesse of silver had played a double part? Robin sat in spiritual torment all through the meal, watching Tinteniac’s men much as a rabbit in the grass watches a falcon hovering for a swoop. When it happened that the fellows whispered together, he created their words out of the terror of his heart, and figured them out into ignominy and shame. Stephen Raguenel could make nothing of his son that night, and TiphaÏne, who had watched Robin jealously for many days, set the news of Tinteniac’s coming beside her brother’s moody face. The lad’s look troubled her, and she was filled with a vague dread of something she could not yet foreshadow.

Robin went to his bed in the room beside the chapel, but not to sleep. The darkness and the silence of the night intensified the misery of his moral loneliness and held him yet more at the mercy of his conscience. Toss and turn as he would, he could not escape from the conviction that his cowardice had been discovered and that the Sieur de Tinteniac was coming, like some stern St. Michael, to smite and to condemn. Even as a man upon the mountains may see the image of his own body magnified and distorted by the mist, so the lad’s conscious guilt took fright at its own fear. He sat shivering in bed, his teeth chattering, his face white with the moonlight that poured into the room. Alone, in the silence of the night, he was like a frightened child, who yearns for a mother’s warm arms and words of comfort.

It was past midnight when TiphaÏne was awakened by hearing some one knocking at her door. She sat up in bed and listened, the moonlight falling across the coverlet and touching her white arms and bosom.

Again she heard a hand knocking on the carved panels of the door.

“Who’s there?”

Since no voice answered her, she slipped out of bed, and, throwing a long cloak about her, opened the door and looked out into the passage. Leaning against the wall, with its hands over its face, TiphaÏne saw a dim and shrinking figure, the figure of her brother.

“Robin!”

She stood with one hand on the door, looking at Robin, a strained wonder on her face.

“Robin, what is it?—are you ill?”

She heard him groan as though in pain.

“TiphaÏne, my God, what shall I do? It is all a lie—a miserable lie!”

She leaned forward, seized Robin’s hands, drew them down, and looked into his face.

“You have lied to us?”

“Yes—”

“Of what?”

“I never fought at Mivoie; I was afraid; Bertrand took my arms.”

TiphaÏne dropped his hands and started back from him, a look—almost of fierceness—on her face.

“Robin, is this the truth?”

The misery of his silence answered her.

“What! You played the coward!—you let Bertrand make this sacrifice!”

Her clear voice rang along the gallery, calling echoes from the sleeping house. Robin, terrified, sprang forward and gripped her arm.

“TiphaÏne, you will wake every one; listen to me—”

She shook him off, cold as the moonlight for the moment, the shock of her brother’s shame making her hard and pitiless.

“You think that I shall help you to act this lie?”

His hands leaped out to her with futile pathos in the darkness.

“TiphaÏne, I cannot bear it; Tinteniac comes to-morrow.”

“Well, what then?”

“He may know everything. They will strike off my spurs, and I can never show my face in Brittany again. TiphaÏne, for God’s sake—help me!”

She unbent nothing to him, the pitifulness of his weakness filling her with a sense of overmastering scorn and anger.

“No, no.”

“But my father!”

“And you will let Bertrand suffer?”

“He made me promise.”

“Yes, and you kept the promise! My God, to think that you should be so mean!”

She leaned against the door-post, one hand at her throat, her eyes blazing even in the dim mingling of moonlight and of gloom. Robin was standing with his hands clasped about his head like a man frightened by the lightning in a storm.

“What can I do?—what can I do?—”

He repeated the words again and again, hardly knowing what he said. The very reiteration of the cry seemed to anger his sister, as the prattling of a child may anger a woman who is in trouble.

“Fool, keep quiet; let me think.”

Robin ceased his babbling and leaned against the wall, watching TiphaÏne, his face vacuous and flaccid about the mouth. For some minutes there was silence between them, a silence that seemed spaced by the rapid beating of the man’s heart.

TiphaÏne stirred herself at last and stepped back over the threshold into her room.

“Go back to bed,” she said, quietly.

Robin did not parley with her.

“You will help me?” he asked, with quivering mouth.

“To tell the truth, yes,” and she closed the door on him and left him shivering in the dark.

It happened that morning soon after dawn that two of the brothers of the abbey of Lehon, who had gone out to work in the fields, saw a man running along the road that wound between poplar-trees towards the abbey. They stood and waited for the man to approach, struck by his strange look and the way he reeled from side to side. He came on like one half-dead with running, his mouth open, his eyes glazed. Not at first did they recognize his face, so drawn and distorted was it with suffering and despair.

“The abbey?—the abbey?”

He stood panting, waving his hand vaguely down the road, his knees giving under him so that he rocked like a young tree in a wind.

“By the love of Our Lady, it is Messire Robin!”

They moved towards him, thinking him mad, but the man dodged them and ran on down the road. The two brothers stood looking after him, wondering what ill news was in the wind that the young lord of La BelliÈre ran half naked along the highway to Lehon.

Master Stephen, the abbot, knelt at his prayers in the parlor when the brother who served as porter came to him with a grave face and told how Messire Robin Raguenel had run half naked into the abbey church and was lying like one dead before the altar. Master Stephen, who was a man of substance and circumspection, dismissed the brother and went alone into the church. On the altar steps he found Robin lying, weeping like a child, his face hidden in his arms.

“Messire Robin! Messire Robin!”

A pitiful face met the abbot’s astonished eyes. It was sharp and sallow, like the face of a man who had come through some great sickness. Before he could prevent him the lad had clasped Stephen by the knees.

“Father, take me in, I will take the vows, I—”

He sank down in a dead faint, his hands still clutching the hem of the old man’s robe. Some of the brothers who were in the cloisters came when the abbot called them. Together they lifted Robin up, and, wondering, carried him from the church.