While Dubois, Bodegat, and the rest poured into the orchard to gaze at Croquart’s headless body, TiphaÏne led back her palfrey to the house, where the horses of the dead Fleming and his men still waited in the hall to be fed and watered. The beasts turned their heads to look at her, their eyes seeming to ask what had befallen their masters in the night. Croquart’s own horse was strangely restless and uneasy, ears laid low, the whites of the eyes showing, and an inclination to kick very evident in his heels.

Leaving her palfrey stalled in the dirty hall, where the embers of the fire, harness, and baggage littered the floor, she mounted the stairs to the room in the gable, meeting Tinteniac at the open door. His wounded shoulder had given him a ludicrous but painful contest with his clothes, and he appealed to a woman’s hands for the righting of his wrongs. There was a characteristic distinction in the way the pale and imperturbable patrician stood to be brooched and buckled without squandering a fragment of his dignity. Head held high, the sunlight touching the silver in his hair, a sensitive smile softening his mouth, he felt a youth’s tremor at the nearness of her hands, and feared to look at her because she seemed so fair.

“The flies are buzzing about the dead dog,” and he pointed to the Bretons who were crowding and elbowing about Croquart’s body.

“How pitiful his boastings seem to me now!”

“Yes, mine was the last notch he cut upon his spear.”

Tinteniac seemed the grand seigneur again—tall, gracious, a man whose face had the quality of command. TiphaÏne felt that his manner had changed towards her, as though he were too honorable to prolong their supposed intimacy, however pleasant the playing of the part might seem. And yet she discovered more than mere gentleness in his eyes towards her, a posture of his manhood that betrayed homage and desire.

She fastened the brooch at his throat, and stood back from him, looking aside towards the window, where the iron men trampled the long grass under the orchard trees.

“Sire, I have much to thank you for.”

“The thanks should come from the man whom you have trusted.”

“Well, we will exchange our gratitude.”

“And I can swear to being flattered by the bargain.”

He bowed to her, and for the moment she felt herself a mere ignorant girl, uneasy and half abashed under the eyes of a courtier whose manners were too splendid. Tinteniac’s stateliness made her sincerity seem incomplete. It was difficult to repulse a man whose methods were without aggression.

“Sire, I had almost forgotten that I have your ring.”

“My ring?”

“Yes,” and she slipped it from her finger and let the circle of gold lie in her white palm.

Tinteniac looked at her, yet without a stare, and was slow in the stretching out of his hand.

“Can you not keep it?”

Their eyes met, but TiphaÏne’s were the first to fall.

“Sire, I cannot.”

“As a remembrancer?”

“No, for it might be unjust.”

A man of forty may be fired with all the inspired impulses of youth. We live in circumstances and are as old as the freshness of our sensibility to music. The fine candor of Tinteniac’s face warmed to the feelings that his heart had cherished.

“I will not trade upon the trust that you have given me. Yet—these few days—”

“Sire,” and he saw that she was troubled, “I have not the heart to hear this from you now.”

“Then—I may wait?”

“I remember that my father waits for me. For his sake I promise nothing for myself.”

She still held the ring out to him, looking bravely in his face, half hating the sincerity that made her hurt him for the sake of truth.

“Your pardon,” and he took the ring.

“Sire, do not misjudge me.”

“You are too honest, child, to be misjudged.”

His fine spirit of chivalry and self-restraint rescued them both from the discomfort of the moment. He slipped the ring upon his finger, and seemed ready to forget what he had asked.

“There are other things to be remembered,” and he looked thoughtfully at the orchard trees. “What are your wishes as to the secret you have given me to share?”

His self-repression pleased her, with its immediate turning to interests that were hers alone.

“You seem to think for me. I feel my lips close when I see these men.”

“Such a truth is not easy in the telling.”

“It is not that I am afraid. But there are memories—and thoughts.”

“That the best of us hold sacred. Do I not understand? Let the truth wait till you meet Beaumanoir at Josselin.”

Her eyes thanked him, for she was loath to expose her pride to these grim men who were sating their blood-lust with staring at a carcass.

“You do not think me a coward?”

“No, God forbid! Who are Dubois and Carro de Bodegat that you should show your heart to them?”

To Tinteniac her reluctance was natural enough, for when a man loves, his sympathies are quickened till he can behold beauty in the simplest workings of the soul. He left TiphaÏne in the little solar, and went to greet Dubois and his brother Bretons, who were crowding from the orchard into the farm-house. So hot was the blood-hate in them that they had stripped Croquart’s body of its armor, hacked off his feet and hands, and driven a stake through the naked torso. The dead Fleming’s fingers were being treasured like ingots of gold, and some of the rougher spirits of the troop called for the slaughtering of Croquart’s horse.

“Down, you mad dogs!” and Dubois saved the animal from their swords, and had his arm badly bitten as he held the beast’s bridle.

The men laughed at their leader’s savage face, and at the way he abruptly reconsidered his opinion.

“The beast has the master’s devil in him,” and he suffered the rough troopers to have their way.

Tinteniac was seized on when he came down into the hall. The men kissed him like great children, for he had been the idol of the Breton soldiery since the combat at the Oak of Mivoie. He broke free from them at last and joined Dubois, who was sitting snarling on a saddle while one of his men rubbed ointment into the horse bite on his arm.

“The result of mistaken mercy, sire,” and he grimaced with the smart of it. “Steady, you fool, steady! you are not scrubbing the hall floor.”

Carro de Bodegat joined them, smiling ironically at Dubois’s oaths and distortions of the face.

“Courage, brother, courage; the son of a mare has as much gratitude as the son of a woman. Is it true, sire,” and he turned to Tinteniac, “that you do not know the name of the bully who pulled down the Fleming here in the orchard?”

Tinteniac confessed that he was as ignorant as the rest, nor did the two knights enlighten him, since the spirit of jealousy strengthened the promise they had made.

To Tinteniac the news of the rout at Josselin explained Croquart’s inordinate hurry to put twenty leagues between him and Pontivy. Dubois and De Bodegat were ready with many questions, and he in turn had much to hear from them. On neither side was Bertrand’s name mentioned; TiphaÏne’s wishes were tending towards his doom.

In a few minutes they had made their plans, Dubois still swearing at the teeth-marks in his arm. Tinteniac, who felt his wounds, desired them to let him rest for a day, and neither Dubois nor Carro de Bodegat demurred at the suggestion. The delay would enable them, in the name of Justice, to vent their ill-humor upon the traitor who had cheated them of Croquart’s head. Dubois had left the bloody trophy hidden in the hovel where Bertrand sat and brooded on the past. The three guards had been ordered to let no one pass, and the whole troop warned against divulging Bertrand’s name.

Tinteniac, knowing nothing of the prisoner in the hovel, returned to the solar to rest on his bed of straw.

It was past noon, and Tinteniac lay asleep, when TiphaÏne, weary of the four walls of the room, went out alone into the orchard. Geoffroi Dubois and Carro de Bodegat were sitting as judges over a wrestling-match that the Breton soldiery had started in the yard. She slipped out almost unnoticed, catching a glimpse of two sturdy troopers hugging each other in the middle of the ring. The white-topped trees and the deep aloneness of the rich green grass were very pleasant to her, for with Croquart’s death and the return of freedom she had a great hunger for her home and for the face of her father, whom she had left in sorrow and unrest. The human consciousness, like the sky, is rarely untraversed by a cloud, the azure days serving only to part one gray noon from another. And to such a heart as TiphaÏne’s solitude called from the deeps of nature where the warm sap spread into the quiet faces of the flowers.

The Breton soldiers were shouting and exchanging wagers in the yard, their loud voices bringing discords where she sought for silence; nor was the orchard bereft of horror, seeing that Croquart’s body, naked and mutilated, lay near the house, with a stake trust through it. TiphaÏne could see the glint of the golden meadows sweeping towards the arches of the trees. It would be good, she thought, to wander away into the fields, to let her gown sweep the waving grass, to watch the larks soar, and to hear them sing.

The desire led her towards the hovel where Bertrand waited for the end, the three guards gossiping together and leaning on their spears. A mere passing curiosity stirred in her like a thought suggested to a wayfarer by some grotesque tree beside the road. She had no vision of Bertrand sitting upon the pile of faggots, his head bowed over his roped hands.

The three men saluted her, and she turned aside to ask why Messire Geoffroi Dubois took such trouble to guard a mere stack of sticks.

“A prisoner, madame,” said the tallest of the three.

“A prisoner?”

“A common thief we picked up on the road from Loudeac. Messire Dubois will give him the rope anon.”

TiphaÏne passed on, and yet the soldier’s curt and casual words had robbed the meadows of half their restfulness. She found herself repeating those same words: “A common thief. Messire Dubois will give him the rope anon.” It was as though her sorrow had opened the heart of pity to all the world. Death and the pathos of it seemed everywhere—in the woods and fields, in the monk’s cell, and in the castles of the great. TiphaÏne’s heart was full of that deep tenderness that dowers the meanest life with significance and the power of awaking pity. She seemed to hear the whimpering of this poor wretch, caged like an animal awaiting the butcher’s knife. What though he was “a common thief,” a rogue, an outcast, her soul had found something on which to pour the divine dew that God gives to those who suffer. The purpose came to her as she wandered slowly over the fields. One man’s life should be spared that day; she would beg it of Dubois before the sword could spill more blood.

As for Bertrand, he had heard TiphaÏne’s voice, and sat shaking as with an ague, his eyes staring vacantly at the wattled wall of the hovel. It seemed to him of a sudden that he was less strong than he had believed, for the soul in him cried out for life and the joy of being. In a day he would have followed Croquart to the awe of the unknown, the woman for whom he had suffered knowing nothing of his end. The loneliness and the bitter smart of it made him for the moment like a forgotten child. Great tears were wet upon his cheeks, and for once no angry hand dashed them impatiently away.