In the underwood that topped a high bank overhanging the road where it swept round the beech wood a man in black harness crouched behind the twisting roots and stems of a clump of hazels. The black shell of steel was almost indistinguishable in the shadows. Snakelike it had crawled through a bank of gorse and reached the hazels overhanging the road.

Bertrand, with his sword naked at his side, had lifted his head cautiously and looked down into the road through a loop left by the twisting roots. The first glance had shown him TiphaÏne seated on her palfrey under the trees, watching Tinteniac weakening before the Fleming’s sword. Bertrand was not a man easily astonished, but his heart gave a great leap in him as he saw the Lady of the Aspen Tower with the sunlight shining through the branches on her face. Bertrand’s thoughts were in a tangle for the moment. The Sieur de Tinteniac fighting with Croquart the Fleming, and the Vicomte de BelliÈre’s daughter waiting to be claimed as the better man’s prize! Bertrand felt dazed for the moment by the utter unexpectedness of the scene before him. The whole tone of the adventure had changed on the instant. Had a miracle been performed before him the man amid the grass and hazels, with bluebells nodding about his body, could not have been more struck than by this strange interweaving of the threads of fate.

When Tinteniac fell, Bertrand was on his knees, teeth set, sword ready, on the brink of a battle with the Fleming. The three men-at-arms watching the fight had not seen the black figure poised amid the hazel boughs. It hung there a moment as though hesitating, and then dropped back again into the grass and leaves.

TiphaÏne was facing Croquart, while Tinteniac grovelled on his elbow, and this new grouping of the characters had sent Bertrand back to cover. He lay like a fallen bough, almost invisible, his body sunk in the dead leaves and the grass tussocks, hearing TiphaÏne speak, yet unable to catch her words. Her face, clear before him in the sunlight, had that look that was peculiar to her when her courage was in arms. She was speaking for Tinteniac, and Bertrand watched her, noting the play of feeling on her face with the intentness of a man who watches the face of one he loves. It hurt him to see her speaking for Tinteniac, so sensitive is the strongest heart when a woman’s eyes have power to wound or heal. The old blind feeling of bitterness that had been bred in him at Motte Broon rushed up to tantalize him with the imagined meaning his instinct set upon the scene.

Croquart gave her the wine-flask and the linen, and she knelt beside Tinteniac, one arm about his shoulders, her face very close to his. Bertrand winced, drove one knee into the grass, and yet cursed himself for a credulous fool. Would any woman stand by and see a wounded man bleed to death, and would that woman be TiphaÏne of La BelliÈre?

Croquart had moved away, and was shouting orders to his men. Bertrand heard them, though his eyes never left Tinteniac, with his head upon TiphaÏne’s knee. They seemed to be speaking together in low tones, and watching the broad back the Fleming had turned to them for the moment. Bertrand saw their hands touch, and looks that were alive with a subtle significance pass between them. Bertrand would have given all he had to have heard the words they had spoken.

The little picture was broken at last, though it seemed to the man among the hazels that Tinteniac had had hours at his disposal. They were binding up the wounded shoulder, and there was blood, Tinteniac’s blood, on TiphaÏne’s hands. With some trick of the memory the sight of it brought back to Bertrand the vision of Arletta dying with red hands in that dark tower amid the beeches of Broceliande. It was as though God’s voice had called to him—a still, small voice amid the silence of the mysterious woods. The perfervid selfishness went out of him like the lust out of the man who remembers the womanhood of his mother.

Bertrand’s hands gripped the blade of his sword as he lay with it crosswise under his throat. He saw TiphaÏne rise, draw aside, her face hidden by her hands. Bertrand felt numb at the sight of it, yet very humble. If she wept for Tinteniac, then Tinteniac was of all men the most to be honored. Honored? And Bertrand’s face burned with the hot memories of many unclean years—years when he had bartered his manhood for harlots’ kisses.

He drew back slowly from under the hazels, and, crawling through the gorse and underwood, reached the place where he had left his horse. A dead tree lay there that had fallen in a winter gale, and Bertrand sat down on the trunk with his drawn sword across his knees. He was humbled, but the struggle was not over with him yet. His heart was still full of the bitterness of the man who covets what he imagines another man to possess.

Bertrand sat on his tree-trunk with the sword across his knees and stared at his horse, that was trying to crop the grass, though the bridle was hitched over the bough of a tree. The oak bough would not bend, nor would the grass spring up to the hungry beast’s muzzle. Bertrand, with a wry twist of the mouth, saw that he and his horse were the victims of a somewhat similar dilemma.

Jealousy is the great distorter of justice, and Bertrand had the devil at his elbow for fully ten minutes on the trunk of the dead tree. The imp shouted every imaginable grievance in his ear, exaggerating possibilities into facts and creating reality from conjecture. Had not he, Bertrand du Guesclin, sacrificed himself for Robin Raguenel’s sake, and accepted shame to save a coward? If TiphaÏne was so tender for Tinteniac’s sake, then, by God, let Tinteniac look to the guarding of his own petticoats!

But that great advocate whose irony slashes to shreds the special pleading of the meaner spirit, the sense of chivalry, that great chastener of manhood, took up the argument in Bertrand’s cause. All ethical struggles are fierce in powerful natures, fierce in their climax, but sure in their decision. Bertrand’s honesty was not to be cajoled. He sat in judgment on himself, the self-asking of a few pitiless questions baring that sincerity that makes true strength.

When he carried Robin’s arms at Mivoie, had he not hoped that some day TiphaÏne might know what he had done?

Had TiphaÏne ever given him the promise of any deeper thing than friendship?

Whose past was the cleaner, the Sieur de Tinteniac’s or his own?

Bertrand knotted his brows over these accusations, and confessed that the spirit of justice had him at its mercy.

He rose, stood irresolute a moment, and then moved towards his horse. The imp of jealousy made a last leap for his shoulders. Bertrand shook them, and was a free man, breathing in new inspiration for the days to come.

Now Croquart had ordered two men-at-arms to go and cover the bodies of Tinteniac’s esquires, who lay dead together in the middle of the forest road. Bertrand was no hot-headed fool. He knew enough of the Fleming and his men to realize that a mere free lance such as he seemed would be treated to no such courtesy as had been given to Tinteniac. He was worth no ransom. If worsted, the point of a spear or the edge of a sword would give him his quittance in the Loudeac woods.

Bertrand knew, also, that he would have no chance with Croquart and his three men, one against four, and that Croquart would not trouble to engage him singly as he had engaged Tinteniac. For one moment Bertrand thought of returning towards Josselin, in the hope of meeting some of Dubois’s men. But the plan did not please him. He had marked down Croquart as his own stag.

Unhitching his bridle from the bough of the tree, he took his spear, that rested against the trunk, and, making a dÉtour through the woods, bore towards the place where the two esquires lay dead.

Croquart, meanwhile, was preparing to resume his march on Loudeac. He had dressed and bound Tinteniac’s wounds, and lifted that gentleman back to the saddle.

“I take your word, sire, as a knight—and a Breton.”

“Be easy, friend, I have not enough blood in me to give you trouble.”

Croquart turned to hold TiphaÏne’s stirrup. She had ceased her anger of weeping, and her face had the white sternness of one whose courage has cooled from the heat of passion. Croquart’s smile was as powerless as a feeble sun upon the winter of her face. She mounted, took the bridle, and looked into the distance to avoid meeting the Fleming’s eyes.

Croquart and TÊte Bois got to horse. The two men who were covering the dead bodies with sods and leaves were to follow the Fleming as soon as their work was done. Croquart placed himself between TiphaÏne and Tinteniac. He had rearmed himself in all his heavy harness. No more courtesies were to be expected from him that day.

They had hardly gone a hundred yards when a cry came stealing through the silence of the woods. It held a moment, quivered, to end in a last up-leap like the last flash of a gutted candle. Croquart reined in and set his hand upon his sword. His face, ugly in repose, grew doubly sinister as he glanced back under the boughs of the trees.

A single man-at-arms came cantering over the grass, crouching in the saddle and looking back nervously over his shoulder. Croquart swore at him as he pulled up his horse.

“Hallo, cur!—where is Guymon?”

The man straightened in the saddle and pointed towards Josselin.

“A fellow ran at us out of the woods, struck down Guymon with his spear—”

“And you used the spurs.”

The man agreed, as though Croquart’s anger was preferable to the stranger’s spear.

“Well, what next?”

“The man turned back into the woods, captain.”

“What! He did not follow you?”

“No.”

“How was he armed?”

“Rusty harness that had been oiled and looked black.”

“And both of you ran away—he from you, and you from him.”

“Yes, captain.”

Croquart laughed, and turned again towards Loudeac.

“You must have looked fiercer than you are, fool, or else your brother coward has stopped behind to take the dead men’s rings.”

The free lance accepted the explanation. As a matter of fact, he had taken the dead men’s rings himself, but he did not trouble to tell Croquart so.