A desolated homestead in a valley among the northern hills gave Croquart and his prisoners shelter the same night. The house, built of unfaced stone and thatched with straw and heather, had been plundered by some of Bamborough’s English, whose passion for thoroughness in their thieving moved them to burn what they could not carry.

Croquart rode into the grass-grown yard, where all the byres and out-houses had been destroyed by fire, nothing but a few charred posts rising above the weeds and nettles. The Fleming dismounted, after sounding his horn to see whether any of the farm folk still loitered about the place. They found the house itself to be full of filth, for the birds had roosted on the rafters, and the English used it as a stable, the droppings from their horses rotting upon the floor. It held nothing but the hall, a cellar, and the goodman’s parlor under the western gable—the last room being a little more cleanly than the hall, its single window, with the shutter broken, looking down upon the orchard. Pears and apples piled up their bloom above the rank splendor of the grass—a sea of snow flecked and shaded with rose and green. To the east of the orchard a great pool shimmered in the sunlight, its waters dusted with blown petals from the trees.

Tinteniac was so stiff and sore with his wounds after the day’s ride that Croquart had to help him from his horse. The Fleming, who had examined the house, took Tinteniac in his arms, and carried him to the upper room, where there was some mouldy straw piled in a corner. He laid Tinteniac on the straw, having made a show of his great strength by carrying a man taller than himself with the ease that he would have carried a child of five. Croquart had recovered his self-complacency since his skirmish with TiphaÏne in the morning, and she had had nothing to charge him with save with his insufferable boasting.

Tinteniac was so utterly weary that he had not sufficient mind-force left in him to resent his being treated as a dead weight for the exhibition of the Fleming’s strength. He drew a deep breath of relief when he felt his body sink into the straw—too faint to care whether the bed was one of swan’s-down or of dung. In five minutes he was fast asleep.

Harduin had watered the horses and stabled them in the hall, lit a fire, and slung the cooking-pot over a couple of forked sticks. In a little hovel at the end of the orchard Croquart had found some clean straw, and carried a truss into the goodman’s parlor to make TiphaÏne a bed. She met him with a finger on her lip, and pointed to Tinteniac, whose tired body drank in sleep as a dry soil drinks in rain. How much alone she was, how wholly at the Fleming’s mercy, she only realized as she watched him spread the straw in a far corner of the room.

“You will sleep softly enough,” he said, turning on his knees, and looking at her with an expression of the eyes she did not trust.

“It is not likely that I shall sleep,” and she moved aside towards the window.

“No bedfellow, eh?” And he got up with a chuckle, leaving her alone with the wounded man upon the straw.

Presently he returned with a pitcher full of water, some brown bread, and a few olives. He set them down on a rough bench by the window, and loitered foolishly at the door.

“I trust madame has forgotten the quarrel we had this morning?”

“I am ready to forget it, Messire Croquart.”

“Thanks,” and he gave her an impudent bow, “we shall be better friends before we reach Morlaix.”

When he had gone she closed the door on him, and found to her delight the wooden bar that was used in lieu of a latch. The staples were firm in the oak posts, yet not so firm that she could abandon her distrust. The rough bench at the window, a cup of water, olives, and bread; with such comforts she was content, so long as the door parted Croquart and herself. While Tinteniac slept she watched the sun sink low behind the woods that broke like green waves upon the bosoms of the hills. Below her lay the orchard trees, smothering the old house with beauty under the benisons of eve. Swallows were skimming over the still waters of the pond, and the mist in the meadows covered the sheeted gold of May.

In the dirty cobwebbed hall Croquart was making his plans for the coming night. The house door, studded with iron nails, lay wrenched from its hinges in the yard, and through the open windows the birds and bats could come and go. Croquart, sitting on a saddle by the fire, his sword across his thighs, called Harduin to him, and offered him the same bribe as he had given TÊte Bois the night before.

“Well, my friend, are you in a hurry to desert?”

The fellow fidgeted under the Fleming’s eyes.

“Come, let us understand each other; I have a mind to be generous. Will you stand by Croquart the Fleming or follow TÊte Bois, who preferred a ring to a thousand crowns?”

Harduin, who had already stolen the rings from Tinteniac’s dead esquires, appeared even more greedy than the Gascon.

“When shall I finger the money, captain?”

“At Morlaix.”

“Call it a bargain.”

“And easily earned, eh? Keep guard in the orchard near the Sieur de Tinteniac’s window.”

Harduin nodded.

“The house shall be my affair. Whistle if you see anything strange.”

“Right, captain.”

And taking his spear and shield with him, he went out into the orchard to keep watch.

About midnight Tinteniac awoke, and turned on his straw with the confused thoughts of a man whose surroundings are strange to him. TiphaÏne, seated by the window, where the moonlight streamed in upon the floor, went to him quietly, and knelt down by the bed.

“You have slept well,” and she felt his forehead; “there is food here if you are hungry.”

“Asleep! Selfish devil that I am! You must be tired to death.”

“No, I am not tired.”

He looked at her steadily, propping himself upon one arm. Sleep had cooled the fever in him, freshened his brain, and strengthened the beating of his heart. The room lit by the moonlight, the perfumed coolness of the night, the white face of the woman by the bed, filled him with a sense of strangeness and of mystery.

“It is my turn to watch.” And he touched her arm, thrilling, man of forty that he was, at TiphaÏne’s nearness to him in the moonlight.

“There is no need for it; I have barred the door.”

“And Croquart?”

She did not tell him of her great distrust.

“Croquart has left us as man and wife. I have too much to think about to wish to sleep.”

Tinteniac sank back on his straw, watching her as she brought him the water-pot, bread, and olives.

“I am afraid I am a broken reed,” he said, with the smile of a man contented to be ministered to by a woman’s hands.

“You must gain strength, sire, for both our sakes.”

“Yes, true.”

“Therefore, you must sleep again.”

“I would rather talk.”

“We can talk to-morrow.”

“Have we not changed our parts? Well, I will obey your orders.”

And in half an hour his breathing showed that he had forgotten the world and such subtleties as the glimmer of moonlight on a woman’s hair.

TiphaÏne had returned to her seat by the window, her sense of loneliness increased now that Tinteniac was asleep. The night, with all its infinite uncertainty, its vague sounds and distorted shadows, filled her with restlessness and with those imaginings that people the world with half-seen shapes. The bravest of us are but great children when a wind blows the boughs against the window at midnight, and the moon, that magician of the skies, brings back the childhood of the race, when man trembled before Nature, filling the forest, the desert, and the marsh with goblin creatures born out of his own vivid brain.

Before TiphaÏne at her window stood the orchard trees, pillars of ebony spreading into carved canopies of whitest marble, each chisel-mark perfect as from the touch of a god. The deep grass looked black as water in a well, the wooded slopes of the silent valley steepled with a thousand shimmering spires. Under an apple-tree stood Croquart’s sentinel, leaning lazily against the trunk, the moonlight sifting through the apple bloom and dappling his harness with silver burrs. TiphaÏne had discovered Harduin there, and knew that he had been set there to watch the window. Twice she saw Croquart enter the orchard to assure himself that Harduin was awake at his post.

An hour later she heard the Fleming mount the stairs, stealthily and with the deliberation of a man fearing to wake a household as he creeps to an intrigue. She could hear his breathing as he stood and listened, while the rats scuffled and squeaked under the wood-work of the floor. His hand tried the door, shaking it cautiously with tentative clickings of the wooden latch. TiphaÏne thanked God for the good oak-bar that gave Messire Croquart the lie for once. He turned at last and went back to the hall, where she could hear him swearing and throwing wood upon the fire. There would be no thought of sleep for the mock wife that night.

Now whether TiphaÏne was very quick of hearing, or whether the tension of her distrust had turned up the sensitiveness of her ears, she heard some sound in the moonlit orchard that seemed lost upon Harduin as he leaned against his tree. The noise resembled the faint “tuff—tuff” of a sheep cropping at short grass. Sometimes it ceased, only to commence again, nearer and more distinct to her than before. TiphaÏne strained her ears and her conjectures to set a cause to the approaching sound. She wondered that Harduin had not heard it, and judged that his bassinet might make him harder of hearing than herself.

A suggestion of movement, a vague sheen in the grass showed in the moonlight under the apple-trees, as of something crawling towards the house. Slowly, noiselessly, a figure rose from the grass behind the trunk of the tree against which Croquart’s sentinel was leaning. There was a sudden darting forward of the stooping figure, a flinging out of a pair of arms, a curious choking cry, a short struggle. TiphaÏne saw Harduin drop his spear, writhe and twist like a man with a rope knotted about his neck. In the moonlight she could see the violent contortions of his body, his hands tearing at something that seemed to grip his throat, his feet scraping and kicking at the soft turf. The man’s struggle reminded her of a toy she had had as a child, a little wooden manikin, whose legs and arms flew into grotesque attitudes on the pulling of a string. Before she realized what had happened, Harduin’s muscles relaxed, his hands dropped, and he hung against the trunk of the tree like a man nailed there through the throat. The body slid slowly to earth, doubled upon itself, was seized and heaved up over the shoulders of the other, and carried away into the deeps of the orchard.

A shudder of superstitious terror passed through TiphaÏne. It had been done so swiftly, with such unhuman silence, that Harduin might have been pounced upon by some ogre out of the woods. The patch of grass under the apple-tree fascinated her; her eyes remained fixed on it, her heart going at a gallop, the blood drumming in her ears. With a sudden flash of intuition she remembered TÊte Bois’s disappearance the preceding night, and the way the man Guymon had been stricken down over the bodies of the dead esquires. Some grim and inexorable spirit seemed tracking Croquart through the woods, a fierce shadow that seized its prey under cover of the night.

She lifted her head suddenly with a quick-drawn breath of eagerness and fear. Something was moving in the orchard, for she heard the same peculiar sound that had heralded its first coming. A faint glimmer of harness under the white boughs, and a figure drew out of the mists of the night and halted under the tree where Harduin had stood a few minutes ago. A half-luminous band ran from the man’s breast to the rank grass, the long blade of a sword like a beam of moonlight slanting through a chink in a shuttered window at night. The figure remained motionless, leaning upon the sword, as though it stood on guard in the orchard and waited for the dawn.